Michael Amadori is working on a project that involves fish, leftovers and several heads of lettuce. No, he's not preparing a meal. Using aquaponics, Amadori is testing the use of food waste to grow fish and food. He's using the leftovers to feed the fish. The leftovers are dried and molded into pellets. The idea is to utilize food scraps that would normally go to waste.

"We're going to look at supplementing the commercial fish feed with the food waste pellets. I will perform an economic analysis on it and we're going to compare the cost of making the fish feed and looking at the growth rates of the fish between the two different types of feed,"Amadori said.

Cost analysis isn't the only thing going on here. Aquaponics is a process that combines aquaculture, like fish, with the cultivation of plants in water. It's an ideal way to 'farm' produce in urban areas where it isn't otherwise accessible.