The Fortune Cookie and the Feast

This is the time of year when many diets swerve off the side of the road and end up in multi-helping pileups. The many opportunities to put food in our bellies, however, ought also to become food for thought.

Although we have lost the primordial meaning behind the feasts we recognize (how many of us, for example, celebrated Thanksgiving by emerging from months of semi-starvation in urgent need of replenishing depleted fat reserves?), celebrations that revolve around food and overeating date back to prehistoric times. The feasts we attend at this time of year mark national, religious, and seasonal occasions whereby we symbolically relive experiences that bind us together in a common future.

Even on a daily basis, however, eating goes to the core of human culture. This was brought home to me in a very practical way when I was working at Chinese restaurants as a graduate student. Among the food items offered was one that was completely new to me—the fortune cookie. Although some historians have suggested that the inspiration for fortune cookies came from the 14th century, when Chinese soldiers slipped messages into moon cakes
to help coordinate their overthrow of Mongolian invaders, fortune cookies have never been a part of Chinese food culture. The fortune cookie is entirely a U.S. invention, but just where in America these cookies were first made is a matter for debate. One story says that Canton-native David Jung, a Los Angeles baker, began making cookies containing thin slips of paper bearing inspirational messages sometime around 1920. No matter when they began, you will rarely eat in a Chinese-American restaurant without receiving one at the end of the meal. The thing that amazed me was that, no matter how quiet the party at the table might have been throughout the meal, when the diners broke open the cookies to reveal their fortunes, they almost always took turns reading them aloud and sharing their thoughts. Thus, a group of people who might have left immediately after the meal had they been in some other kind of restaurant, often stayed and talked for another 20 minutes or more after the fortune cookie course. Hardly anyone considers who might have started this conversation, or that it might have been the person who wrote those fortunes.

A recent article in the New Yorker (June 6, 2005) identified one central character in the fortune cookie story. Donald Lau, a vicepresident of Wonton Food, manages the company’s accounts payable and receivable, negotiates with insurers, and—almost incidentally— composes the fortunes that go into the four million cookies the Wonton factory produces each day. Lau got the job simply because his English was the best among the group that bought the baking company, and because the fortunes the company had been using needed updating. Lau admits that at first the writing came easily and he could crank out three or four maxims a day. But now, eleven years into his tenure as a fortune cookie author, he has run out of ideas and is recycling old fortunes. He has begun to worry that readers will notice that the cookies are in reruns.

Luckily, we no longer suffer the reruns of seasonal food shortages as did our ancestors. Our celebrations now, as the anthropologist Marvin Harris once noted, are “merely occasions for raising prior consumption levels from more than enough to far more than enough.” For some of us, however, the situations and conversations characterizing these seasonal gatherings will be similar to the recycled fortunes Mr. Lau worries about. There will be, as usual, too much to eat and drink, and there will also be the same people who tell the same stories over and over. Just as there will be those we genuinely look forward to seeing, there will be those who continue to irritate us. To experience these gatherings as mere reruns, however, is to miss the cultural core of such events because these gatherings are not reruns. Rather they are opportunities that give meaning to our lives by enabling the exchange of news and stories about relatives in faraway places or ancestors long gone. We may also discover that others are experiencing life and its cycles and challenges in ways similar to our own. For our children, these reunions are even more important because they emphasize the significance of family and social connections in ways far more powerful than words. Even young children are made aware of belonging to a social entity larger than themselves, their siblings, and their parents. They are given tangible knowledge of themselves as parts of human lineages to which they, in time, will also contribute.

These seasonal rituals are special for yet another reason: more and more families no longer share meals at a common table but eat separately or on the run. This phenomenon presumably reflects the inescapable realities of modern life, but it also says something about the ties that bind us together and the values at the core of our culture. Children who end up eating most of their meals on their own will make it to soccer practice on time but will experience less family solidarity. Although it may seem like an endless series of reruns to children, it is not just the fact that sharing a family meal probably provides better nourishment, or that eating together teaches manners, it’s the time spent sharing thoughts that matters.

So, whether it is a feast with a large group, or simply a small family meal, as we take our places at festive tables in the days ahead, we should welcome the opportunity to sit and talk a little longer than we might otherwise. We need to turn off the distractions of modern life for a while and connect with those around us. Perhaps we all need fortune cookies to break open to remind us to share our thoughts at these gatherings; the fortunes ought to be the messages inside our hearts.

All of us at the Center for the Humanities offer all our readers the very best of fortunes over the holiday season and the New Year.

Jian Leng, Associate Director
The Center for the Humanities

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The Center for the Humanities
Advisory Board 2005-2006

Nancy Berg
Associate Professor of The Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern Studies Program

Ken Botnick
Associate Professor of Art

Lorenzo Carcaterra
Writer

Letty Chen
Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Language and Literature

Robert Henke
Associate Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature
Chair of Comparative Literature

Michael Kahn
Attorney at Law, Blackwell Sanders Peper Martin

Larry May
Professor of Philosophy

Steven Meyer
Associate Professor of English

Angela Miller
Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology

Linda Nicholson
Stiritz Distinguished Professor of Women and Gender Studies

Dolores Pesce
Professor of Music

Joe Pollack
KWMU Theatre & Film Critic

Bart Schneider
Editor of Speakeasy

Jeff Smith
Associate Professor of Performing Arts
Director of Film and Media Studies

Robert Vinson
Assistant Professor of History and African and African American Studies

James V. Wertsch
Marshall S. Snow Professor of Arts and Sciences
International and Area Studies

Ex officio

Edward S. Macias
Executive Vice Chancellor & Dean of Arts and Sciences, Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor on Arts & Sciences