The Economics of Everyday Things
00:04:01 · Jennifer Lee, Zachary Crockett
[00:04:01] S4: I was born and raised in New York City. And so when we went to our local Chinese takeout, they would also give me fortune cookies. So I grew up thinking that fortune cookies were Chinese. [00:04:12] S2: Years later, Lee took a deeper look at fortune cookies, and she began to grow suspicious. [00:04:21] S4: Chinese food is actually generally terrible at desserts. We have mooncakes, which basically taste and look like hockey pucks or these weird rice porridge things with a lot of stuff floating around in it. It's like fungus and little berries, and it is an absolute disappointment. If you look at a fortune cookie and you look at the dessert tree of China, there is, like, no genetic ancestry, not even close. [00:04:49] S2: Lee embarked on a journey to track down the birthplace of the fortune cookie. And in the course of her research, she found evidence that they likely originated in Japan in the mid nineteenth century. They were called sujira senbei or fortune crackers. [00:05:06] S4: They have a much nuttier miso flavor, and they're bigger and browner. But if you see them side by side, you're like, oh, this is an unmistakable family resemblance. In the late eighteen hundreds, there were waves of Japanese immigrants that came to California, some of whom opened bakeries and made these things.
00:05:06 · Jennifer Lee, Zachary Crockett
[00:05:06] S4: They have a much nuttier miso flavor, and they're bigger and browner. But if you see them side by side, you're like, oh, this is an unmistakable family resemblance. In the late eighteen hundreds, there were waves of Japanese immigrants that came to California, some of whom opened bakeries and made these things. [00:05:28] S2: How exactly those Japanese crackers ended up in Chinese restaurants in The United States is a little murky. A leading theory is that a Japanese bakery called Benkyodo sold them in San Francisco around 1906. One of their customers was Makoto Hagiwara, who ran the Japanese tea garden at Golden Gate Park. He started selling the cookies to local Chinese restaurant owners who were trying to cater to American diners' tastes. [00:05:57] S4: The Americans just expected desserts, and fortune cookies emerged as the quintessential, quote unquote, Chinese dessert. [00:06:11] S2: During World War Two, San Francisco was a major military port for ships to the Pacific. Soldiers came there from all over the country. And during their stay, many were exposed for the first time to fortune cookies at Chinese restaurants. [00:06:26] S4: And so when they went back to their local Chinese restaurants, they were like, why don't you have the fortune cookies like they do in San Francisco or California? And these Chinese restaurant owners, through the word-of-mouth network, they basically figure out what these fortune cookies were, and they become an expectation.
00:06:26 · Jennifer Lee, Zachary Crockett
[00:06:26] S4: And so when they went back to their local Chinese restaurants, they were like, why don't you have the fortune cookies like they do in San Francisco or California? And these Chinese restaurant owners, through the word-of-mouth network, they basically figure out what these fortune cookies were, and they become an expectation. [00:06:48] S2: Lee says that when Japanese Americans were put in internment camps, Chinese business owners bought up many of the fortune cookie operations. By the nineteen sixties, the government had introduced more favorable immigration policies that nearly doubled the Chinese American population. A wave of Chinese restaurants opened across the country, and that meant many more fortune cookies. [00:07:12] S4: They just really caught fire in The United States. [00:07:17] S2: Initially, Chinese restaurants had to place orders with small family run fortune cookie factories in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The cookies were handmade, and a top notch employee could fold around seven fifty cookies an hour. But eventually, the demand grew so large that humans could no longer keep up. [00:07:40] S4: You go from something that originally was handcrafted, made in mom and pop shops to the point where there's machinery and automation and, like, industrial scale. No one chooses what Chinese restaurants are gonna eat at by the fortune cookie. So it's basically a commodity product. It favor someone who can plug into a nationwide distribution network.
00:07:40 · Jennifer Lee, Zachary Crockett, Norman Wong
[00:07:40] S4: You go from something that originally was handcrafted, made in mom and pop shops to the point where there's machinery and automation and, like, industrial scale. No one chooses what Chinese restaurants are gonna eat at by the fortune cookie. So it's basically a commodity product. It favor someone who can plug into a nationwide distribution network. [00:08:03] S2: Today's machines produce 8,000 fortune cookies an hour. Most of those family run cookie factories have been put out of business, And the industry is now dominated by a few giants, one of which controls the bulk of the market. [00:08:20] S4: You basically have one really big gorilla that makes fortunes, which is wonton food. [00:08:25] S3: We're talking about millions of cookies a day. [00:08:28] S2: Again, that's Norman Wong, the CEO of Wonton Food. The company traces its roots back to his father, Ching Sun Wong, who immigrated to New York in the nineteen sixties. [00:08:42] S3: Just a typical story. You know, came with very little money in his pocket, did the usual jobs, restaurant, laundromat, construction. I guess he wasn't really good at that kind of work because he kinda got fired and then rehired and so forth. [00:08:56] S2: But Ching Sun possessed a special skill. His family members in China had taught him how to make noodles.
00:08:56 · Zachary Crockett, Norman Wong
[00:08:56] S2: But Ching Sun possessed a special skill. His family members in China had taught him how to make noodles. [00:09:04] S3: And his uncle said to him, as long as you hold on to this skill and craft of noodle making, you'll always be able to find a way to support yourself. He went around and borrowed money from a lot of people, and that's when he started the noodle factory in Chinatown. [00:09:17] S2: Ching Sun later expanded his business by acquiring a small fortune cookie factory, and he began selling them to restaurants alongside his noodles. His son, Norman, took over as CEO in 2013. Today, it's still a noodle company. It's also the nation's leading manufacturer of fortune cookies. [00:09:38] S3: We do dried noodles. We do the fried crispy noodles that you put into wonton soups or your salads. Also, the skins that we use for dumplings, egg rolls, spring rolls. The product that we're most famous for is fortune cookies, and those go out to Chinese restaurants around the country. [00:09:56] S2: We'll take a trip inside the fortune cookie factory after the break.
00:09:56 · Zachary Crockett, S5, S6, S7, S8, S9, S10, S11, S12, S13
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