Every few months, social media invents a new “historical fact” that spreads faster than a TikTok recipe. One of the latest claims insists that people didn’t eat vegetables 500 years ago — or even more dramatically, that most vegetables didn’t exist until recently. It’s a bold claim. It’s also completely wrong. Human beings have been eating vegetables for thousands of years. Many of the vegetables we enjoy today have ancient lineages, and entire civilizations depended on plant-based foods long before supermarkets, seed catalogs, or Instagram food trends existed. Let’s break down what people actually ate 500 years ago — and…