Fortune Favors the Prepared, Part One
January 11th, 2008(This week’s post is part one of two on fortune cookies. As with my two part series on Everybody Votes, this week will be general observations on fortune cookies, while next week will be more specific.)
Fortune cookies have always intrigued me. It’s not for any rational reason, really; I’ve just always had a soft spot for them, I guess. Maybe it’s the idea of a dessert that appeals to more than your sweet tooth, or maybe it’s because they try to say something meaningful to a total stranger in two sentences or less. Or perhaps it’s just because they’re so simple - the only ingredients in them are flour, sugar, butter, vanilla, and milk.
Who knows. It’s not because they’re exotic imports, though: turns out they’re actually an authentic bit of Americana. I didn’t know this before reading that Wikipedia link, but fortune cookies were invented in California, not China (probably in LA or San Francisco). Apparently the Chinese don’t even have a word for fortune cookie. (Exporting them to China would be some serious irony, though. It’s certainly one of the more bizarre ways to try fixing our trade imbalance…)
Lately, though, I’ve wanted to know more. Do fortune cookies have any patterns to their fortunes? Do different manufacturers have different fortune-writing philosophies? What kind of fortune cookies are out there? Well, as you might expect, data online is scarce. That Wikipedia article pretty much sums up most of the relevant articles and data about fortune cookies (i.e., not much). As usual, I knew it was time to pursue the matter more directly.
And so I did. In one of my more daft moments, I purchased 900 (!) fortune cookies off of Amazon, from a variety of vendors. I got all sorts of fortune cookies, in fact. Dark chocolate, citrus, and of course that old standby, vanilla fortune cookies. I saw they even had strawberry and green tea versions. Rest assured that, if I could’ve found them, I’d have bought them. Oddly enough, it’s actually kind of hard to buy fortune cookies online and in bulk. Amazon was the best place I saw.
Anyway, I never knew there were so many varieties. It’s not often you get to have a culinary adventure while also collecting data, so I didn’t mind shelling out a few bucks for a bunch of different kinds. My friends and I have been, uh, fortunate enough to eat many of the cookies over the past week or so.
What’s funny is that most of the insane amount of fortune cookies I bought were probably produced by one manufacturer - Wonton Food Company. Supposedly they produce 90 percent of the fortune cookies in the U.S., which they resell to hundreds of other vendors. The biggest box I bought, a 400-piece box of individually wrapped fortune cookies, was made by them.
If you look at the Wikipedia link I gave earlier, you’ll see a link to a fascinating feature about Wonton Food, courtesy of the International Herald Tribune. (Which was decidedly better than the New Yorker interview with the fortune writer at Wanton Food, also linked from the same Wikipedia page.) Bernard Chow, their marketing coordinator, had some especially great tidbits. Since he works at a food company, his last name is hilarious (to me) and is a fine example of an aptonym to boot.
What really got me about that article, though, was the great data anecdotes. It’s probably the only significant source of fortune cookie data I could find online. In the article, Chow (snicker) claims they have 10,000 fortunes, about 2,500 of which are in use at any given time. (That didn’t square with my findings, but I’ll get to that in my next post.) He claims they have 5 major fortune cookie categories: “fortune-telling”, humor, motivational sayings, riddles, and translated Chinese idioms. That’s mostly what I found too (though I never saw any riddles, and humor was scarce).
Wanton’s VP of sales, Derrick Wong, sums up fortune writing this way: “They can’t be offensive, got to be positive, and rated G.” No surprises there. I found mostly the same thing. If you want offensive fortunes, you’ll have to go to a site like this (they’re pretty bad fortunes, indeed) or buy a book like Tasteless Fortunes.
Speaking of books, I also ended up buying a couple of books on fortune cookies in the hope that they would shed some light on things. There wasn’t much factual content in them, sadly, but surprisingly both had a lot of fortunes in them.
That’s important, because I really didn’t feel like cracking open 900 fortune cookies. (Or opening a Chinese restaurant.) In the end, I only did around 300. I took the other 200 or so fortunes in my data set from those two books. (I had 500 fortunes total.) You might expect me to follow this up by saying I ate them or had a creative use for 300 empty fortune cookies, like feeding the homeless. Sadly, I neither ate nor did anything else with most of them. I threw the vast majority out. (I know, I know, starving people in Asia, yadda yadda yadda. Who knows if they would even like “American cookies”, though?) Also, one of the smaller boxes I got was entirely stale, and it smelled like mothballs. No way I was eating those.
After looking at all those fortunes, what did I find out? Well, first I divided fortunes into 4 types: Compliments, Advice, Predictions, and “Other”. (Not that far off what Mr. Chow proposed, especially since I often saw Chinese sayings that I called “Advice”.) I ranked all the fortunes myself, going with my gut and the “spirit of the fortune” when things got ambiguous. Here’s a basic table summarizing things:
As the IHT article mentions, fortune telling fortunes (”Predictions”) are indeed popular in the cookies themselves. You are probably just as likely to get advice instead of fortunes from the cookies, though. Compliments are frequently found, too, but I didn’t see many in the books. (Maybe that would’ve made them self-help books instead.) It turned out that the fortune telling books were more filled with advice than anything.
The “Other” category above mostly consisted of marketing ploys for the restaurant, jokes, and current statements of fact/guesses about the fortune reader. In any case, they were infrequent.
It seems people are looking to fortune cookies primarily for advice. Many of the fortunes read like excerpts from “The World in a Phrase”, a book about aphorisms. In addition, I found a couple of direct paraphrases of Sun Tzu from “The Art of War”, and several Asian folk sayings, such as “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down”. (Not a popular saying here for obvious reasons.)
But, at least with the cookies, it seems like people often want predictions too. They reminded me of a bit about psychic hotlines that I read in the book “Why People Believe Weird Things”. In that book, they say people call those hotlines for one of four reasons: love, health, money, and career. You’ll see a lot of those same themes in fortune cookie predictions (and also the same level of vagueness). And a fortune cookie is a hell of a lot cheaper than some 4-dollar-a-minute hotline. Maybe people who really need guidance should go out for Chinese instead?
And what would a post about fortune cookies be without its own fortune? Though I wasted many of the fortune cookies I used, I kept all the fortunes I got and stuck them in a plastic bowl I decided to call “The Oracle”. Forget the Magic 8-Ball - this thing is WAY more specific. The fortune you pick might have nothing to do with your current situation, but you can be sure it’ll be a bit of prescient wisdom anyway. What, then, did The Oracle have to say about this post? “Did you remember to order your take out also?” Well, sometimes The Oracle has better days than others.
(See you next week for specific observations on the fortunes I read. As per usual, I’ll post my data set then too.)
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January 18th, 2008 at 2:04 am
[…] (Last week I wrote about general trends in fortune cookies, and the fortunes they contained. You don’t necessarily need to have read that post to understand this one, but I’m sure you’ll appreciate the content more if you have.) […]
January 28th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
Dave,
Your post reminded me of a recent new york times article I read… You might find it interesting:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/dining/16fort.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
According to this article, fortune cookies, while not chinese, are almost certainly originally from Japan.
cheers,
Nadine
Thanks Nadine. Ironically I link to that same article in Part 2 of my fortune cookie analysis. It’s a good link! (Though I have my doubts about their origin of fortune cookies…)
- Dave