the fortune cookie

The Fortune Cookie is a thin, crisp cookie baked around a piece of paper with words of faux wisdom or vague prophecy, usually served with Chinese food as a dessert. The message inside may also include a list of lucky numbers (used by some as lottery numbers) and a Chinese phrase with translation. Despite the conventional wisdom, they were actually invented in California, USA, not China.

Origin

San Francisco and Los Angeles both lay claim to the origin of the fortune cookie. Makoto Hagiwara of Golden Gate Park's Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco is said to have invented the cookie in 1909,^[1] while David Jung, founder of the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles, is said to have invented them in 1918.^[2]

San Francisco's Court of Historical Review ruled in 1983 in favor of San Francisco. Although the court was presided over by a Federal judge, the court itself has been criticized as being less than serious and biased in favor of San Francisco. Its conclusions, therefore, might not be the final word on the subject.^[2]

Fortune cookie software

A number of web pages now include fortune cookie-like words of wisdom or other quotes. The Unix program fortune is sometimes used to generate these messages. There are software applications that will append a "fortune cookie" within a user's e-mail signature tag; that is, a random quote, item of trivia, joke, or maxim printed at the bottom of the sender's e-mail message. There are many different fortune cookie databases in public distribution, and some users will often assemble their own lists from various sources.

Fortune cookie payout

The U.S. Powerball lottery drawing of the March 30, 2005 game produced an unprecedented 110 second-place winners, all of whom picked five numbers correctly with no powerball number. The total came out to $19.4 million in unexpected payouts. 89 tickets won $100,000, but 21 additional tickets won $500,000 due to the Power Play multiplier option.^[3]

Powerball officials initially suspected fraud, but it turned out that all the winners received their numbers from fortune cookies made by Wonton Food Inc., a fortune cookie factory in Long Island City, Queens, New York. Apparently, number combinations printed on fortunes are reused in thousands of cookies per day. The five winning numbers were 22, 28, 32, 33, and 39. The sixth number in the fortune, 40, did not match the powerball number, 42.^[3]

In popular culture

The non-Chinese origin of the fortune cookie is humorously illustrated in Amy Tan's novel The Joy Luck Club, in which a pair of Chinese immigrant women find jobs at a fortune cookie factory in America. They are amused by the unfamiliar concept of a fortune cookie but, after several hilarious attempts at translating the fortunes into Chinese, come to the conclusion that the cookies contain not wisdom, but "bad instruction".

There is a common joke involving fortune cookies that involves appending "in bed", "with a battle axe" or "between the sheets" to the end of the fortune, usually creating a sexual innuendo or other bizarre messages (e.g., "Every exit is an entrance to new experiences [in bed]" or "You will solve your greatest problem [with a battle axe]").^{citation needed]}

Although many people do not take the message in a fortune cookie as a serious oracular device, many of them consider it part of the game that the entire cookie must be consumed in order for the fortune to come true.^[4] Variations on this idea include not eating the cookie if a fortune seems unlucky, or the idea that the entire cookie must be eaten before the fortune is read. Some people believe the fortune will not come true if it is read aloud. Additionally, the fortune is said to come true if one uses the six "lucky numbers" on the back of the fortune to play, and win, a game of Krypto.