Why didn’t they start up a locust factory? John the Baptist ate them.
John the Baptist ate the pods of the locust tree, which is another name for the carob tree; he did not eat insects. My kids have eaten them in Hawaii, they’re sweetish and nutritious, but not something most people would want to live on. He was an ascetic in the wild of course and ate what was handy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locust_tree
“Locust” comes from the Latin locusta, meaning both “locust” (the insect) and “lobster”. By analogy with a levantine use of the Greek word for the insect, akris, for the pods of the carob tree which supposedly resembled it, the pod-bearing North American tree was called “locust” starting in the 1630s.[1]