July 20th is Fortune Cookie Day, a day to celebrate the crisp cookie dessert that often accompanies Chinese food and offers a prophecy — or maybe even lotto numbers — to lucky diners. Although the simple snacks are most often associated with Chinese food, they are likely Japanese in origin, and were originally called “fortune tea cakes” in reference to Japanese tea cakes. In fact, fortune cookies are not even served in China, and only appear in a small number of countries across the world. In the 1890′s or early 1900′s Makoto Hagiwara of Golden Gate Park’s Japanese Tea Garden was the first person to introduce the modern fortune cookie in the United States. During World War II, when thousands of Japanese-Americans were wrongfully detained in internment camps, Chinese-Americans began to manufacture the cookies. Today, about three billion fortune cookies are made each year.
Even though fortune cookies are Japanese in origin, they aren’t usually served in Japanese restaurants, so we’ve been seriously lacking on divinations and lottery numbers for quite some time now. That’s okay though — even though most of the fortunes I’ve received throughout my lifetime have been amusing and light-hearted, there have been a few foreboding, ominous prophecies that have made fortune cookies occasionally creepy.
