Fortune Cookie

After eating Wonton soup and crackers or whatever you prefer in your Chinese food meal, you look around for the FORTUNE COOKIE. Everyone knows that the pick of the cookie is at random and any of the fortunes you receive are by luck of the draw. In spite of this, that’s not to say that we don’t look into the fortune and try and find its meaning. We try and put its significance to our own recent life experiences or our hopes for the near future. But… did you ever wonder who came up with the ideas of a fortune cookie? Who decided that they should put a tiny fortune telling inside the “crispy, bow-shaped sugar cookies served in restaurants as the finale of a Chinese meal?” Americans would automatically give credit to the Chinese. That is not the case however. One legend of the fortune cookie was introduced in the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and the idea pirated by a local Chinese restauranteur. A Japanese American heritage is said that the cookie is a descendent of the sembet; a flat, round, rice cracker. The Chinese believe the fortune cookie is a modern Chinese American interpretation of the moon cake. Legends proclaim that moon cakes were used in the fourteenth century as a means of critical communication. Soldiers communicated strategies by stuffing messages into moon cakes. The concept of message-stuffed pastry has supposedly endured through ages and now uses fortunes within. Perhaps the most plausible and conceivable story dates back to 1918 when David Jung, founder of the Hong Kong Noodle Co., invented the fortune cookie as a sweet treat and encouraging word for unemployed men who gathered on the streets. Today, fortune cookies are mass produced and widely distributed; the fortune cookie is exported to China and Hong Kong with fortunes written in English. Most popular in the United States, the cookies continue to lift spirits with promises of great success, hope, love and harmony, and of course; good fortune.