John the Baptist wasn't really eating bugs: the 'locusts' in the Gospels were actually carob pods

Matthew 3:4 and Mark 1:6 both say John's food was akris (ἀκρίς) and wild honey. Akris is the ordinary Greek word for a locust, the same word used for the locust plagues in Revelation, and it's exactly the food Leviticus 11:22 lists as one of the few insects Jews were allowed to eat. There's no textual variant, no alternate manuscript reading, nothing in the Greek that points to a bean pod instead of a bug. Locusts, dried, roasted, or salted, were ordinary desert food for John's era; ancient and modern accounts of Bedouin diet both mention them.

The carob theory rides on a coincidence of naming, not a translation problem. Carob pods are nicknamed 'St. John's bread' and were sometimes called 'locust bean' or 'locust pods' in English and other languages because the pods vaguely resemble a locust's curved body: the insect gave its name to the plant, not the other way around. Separately, the Gospel of the Ebionites, a lost second-century text known mainly through quotations by church fathers, changed John's diet to honey cakes, apparently because the Ebionites practiced vegetarianism and were uncomfortable with an ascetic prophet eating meat (some manuscripts of that gospel swap akrides, locusts, for enkrides, cakes, a one-letter pun in Greek). That's a theologically motivated edit in a fringe text, not a discovery about what Matthew and Mark actually wrote.

So this is a myth that runs backwards from most entries on this list: the plain, traditional reading (John ate actual locusts) is the one the Greek and the historical record support. The 'actually carob' version is the popular-sounding revision, and it's the one without a textual leg to stand on.