Fortune Cookie Facts

The commonly held notion that they were invented in China typically comes from the fact that they are primarily served in American Chinese restaurants. However, you will not find fortune cookies in actual Chinese restaurants, nor will you find historical records of a similar food item in China.

The largest manufacturer of fortune cookies, Wonton Food, based in New York, even once tried to introduce fortune cookies to the Chinese in the late 1980s. After three years, they gave up, as they simply were not a popular food item in China.

The people often credited with inventing fortune cookies were Japanese immigrants to America. Fortune cookies were actually invented in Japan.

A researcher, Yasuko Nakamachi, encountered a fortune cookie-shaped cracker, called a Tsujiura Senbei, made by hand in a family bakery near a Shinto shrine outside of Kyoto, Japan. This cracker, not only looked like a fortune cookie, it also contained a fortune, called an “omikuji” (fortune slip), and was traditionally sold in shrines and temples.

Around 3 billion fortune cookies are consumed annually world-wide, with most consumed in the United States. Wonton Food produces around 4.5 million fortune cookies per day.

As an aside, Chop Suey, which translates to “break into many pieces,” is commonly believed to be a Chinese food invented in America. Not so. It was invented in Taishan, a district of Guangdong Province, China.

Computer Cookies

Cookies are used to save a user’s information and relay this information between your computer and a website. This is used to authenticate a user, provide easier access to password controlled sites, or save various preferences of the user. Cookies are also used to track the sites you visit as well as what you buy online, and then can be read by companies to send direct ads to you, based on your visits. There are many other uses for cookies, but they are all for the web site owners and not users.

The reason the word cookie is used seems to come from a comparison to fortune cookies – the dessert common from fast-food Chinese inside which there is a slip of paper with a fortune. Early internet programmers likely noticed the similarities of a program that saves information within its code and the fortune cookie slips of paper. Cookies are placed on your computer and you are not told. I have an aversion to anyone saving anything on my computer so I regularly delete all cookies. All browsers have a delete cookies feature.