All big cities have their seamy underside and Toronto the Good is no different. The selfdesignated Centre of the Universe has its share of shysters, grifters, hooligans, hoodlums, gunsels and run of the mill, garden variety thieves. Latenight truck hijackings are not exactly unheard of in Hogtown, so the driver of the tractor-trailer, lately in from California, shouldn't really have been all that surprised to come out after an early breakfast at an East End Toronto truck stop diner to find only a swatch of bare gravel where he'd parked his rig.

Ripped off. An entire tractortrailer along with its $11,000 payload vanished into the Ontario countryside slicker than a Three Card Monte dealer's shuffle. The driver may not have been all that surprised but it's a pretty good bet the thieves were a tad nonplussed when they busted the locks on the trailer door and got a look at the cargo they'd heisted.

Broccoli. The geniuses had managed to steal 30 huge skids of fresh, green, leafy broccoli.

Kind of fitting that broccoli would be the punchline vegetable in a news story 'brite'. Wouldn't have been nearly as funny if the payload had been carrots or onions. There's just something inherently goofy about broccoli.

Well, broccoli looks goofy, for starters. The stalks resemble miniature, supernaturally green and dwarfy deciduous trees on steroids. A bunch of broccoli looks like a forest for Smurfs. It even looks funny as a word. Two 'c's', one 'l'. Say it slowly: brooooooooccoli. Sounds like a belch. Who would come up with a word like that?

The Ancient Romans, actually. Broccoli derives from the Latin word 'brachium', meaning branch or arm. Broccoli is, in fact, a branch of the cabbage family and it has been around forever, or next to it. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder mentioned it in his writings a couple of thousand years ago - and not all that fondly either.

That's the other funny thing about this funny vegetable - almost nobody has a kind word to say about it. Back in the 1950's there was a classic New Yorker magazine cartoon that showed a mother introducing her young son to the vegetable for the first time.

"It's broccoli, dear," she explains tenderly.

The kid replies, "I say it's spinach and I say to hell with it."

George Bush Sr. incurred the wrath of broccoli growers throughout North America when he publicly refused to eat the stuff, saying that one of the perks of being President of the United States was that nobody could force you to eat broccoli.

All this preamble to lead you gently to my guilty, horrible secret: I actually like the stuff.

Which would not normally be good news - I also like beer nuts, cheese doodles and peanut butter and marmalade sandwiches, none of which add years to my life or brownie points to my Canada Food Guide healthy eating profile. But broccoli, it turns out, is almost supernaturally good for you. It's packed with calcium and potassium, not to mention a healthy whack of vitamin C, folic acid and beta carotenes. It also totes a compound called I3C, which boosts production of anti-cancer hormones. And broccoli packs a healthy dose of something called sulforaphane, another cancer fighter. If that's not indecently healthy enough for you, broccoli is also remarkably high in fiber.

No wonder mom was constantly pushing the stuff.

Personally, I don't shill for broccoli because it's good for you or because it tastes divine. I'm a fan because I (try to) write funny for a living. And for a humour writer, broccoli is the only vegetable with legs. Well, aside from rutabagas.

Funny guy Mel Brooks got some comedic mileage out of both broccoli and the insufferably self-righteous health food zealots who try to guilt the rest of us backsliders.

"Listen to your broccoli," Brooks intoned solemnly, "and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it."

Another funny guy, Roy Blount, Jr., was less kind. He penned the only poem I know about the veggie. It goes:

The corner store is out of broccoli. Loccoli.