Broccoli Emoji

A stalk of broccoli with a bushy green crown. 🥦 represents healthy eating, vegetables, and nutrition — but its most culturally interesting meaning is as a coded reference to cannabis.

The resemblance between broccoli florets and marijuana buds is uncanny enough that 🥦 became one of the go-to coded drug emojis, alongside 🌿 and 🍃. On platforms that moderate drug-related content, 🥦 serves as a workaround: saying "just picked up some 🥦" sounds like a grocery trip but often isn't.

The health angle is equally strong. 🥦 is the poster child for the "eat your vegetables" conversation — the universal childhood battle between kids and green food. In wellness culture, it represents clean eating, meal prep, and nutritional virtue. "Eating my 🥦" is shorthand for doing the healthy (if boring) thing.

Approved in Unicode 10.0 (2017). The broccoli emoji arrived relatively late — it took seven years after the first food emoji for this vegetable staple to get representation.

🥦 splits neatly between two audiences that rarely overlap: health-conscious eaters and cannabis enthusiasts.

In wellness and fitness content, 🥦 is the virtuous vegetable. Meal prep posts, nutrition advice, plant-based diet advocacy, and "eat clean" culture all rely on 🥦 as a visual marker. It signals "I'm making healthy choices" in captions and bios. Parents use it when documenting their kids' vegetable wins (or losses).

In cannabis culture, 🥦 is coded language. Drug-related content frequently gets flagged or removed on social platforms, so users adopted 🥦 as a euphemism. "Got the 🥦" or "🥦 time" are common in cannabis-friendly communities. The emoji joins 🌿, 🍃, and 💨 in the informal cannabis emoji vocabulary. The plausible deniability is the point: it could be about vegetables.

The kids-vs-vegetables meme gives 🥦 a third lane. The universal experience of parents trying to get children to eat broccoli makes 🥦 relatable comedy. "My kid treats 🥦 like poison" resonates across every demographic.

• •George H.W. Bush famously declared in 1990: "I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it." The President of the United States used his power to ban broccoli from Air Force One menus.
• •Broccoli is a member of the cabbage family (Brassicaceae). It was engineered by Italian farmers from wild cabbage over centuries of selective breeding — making it literally a human invention, not a natural plant.
• •The broccoli emoji arrived in Unicode 10.0 (2017) alongside other long-requested food items like 🥟 (dumpling), 🥧 (pie), and 🧁 (cupcake). It was part of a major food emoji expansion.