Lifestyle - Fortune Cookie

TRY YOUR FORTUNE

'Your future looks bright'

This is the message on the small piece of paper inside my fortune cookie. I am at the Golden Dragon, a chinese restaurant in New York. In a lot of chinese restaurants in the USA and Europe, it bring fortune cookies when you finish your meal. So most people think the home of these special biscuits is China. But they are wrong.

The story of fortune cookies goes back to 1915, and the clever idea of Makoto Hagiwara, a JapaneseAmerican from San Francisco. You can find fortune cookies in China, but only in the last few years - since 1993, in fact. Tourists like them, but they are not popular with Chinese people because there's a lot of sugar in them. In fact, not many people like the taste of fortune cookies. 'They're very dry and hard is a common opinion! People like them because it is fun to break them and read the message inside.

Fortune Cookies are free when the waiter brings them with your bill, but you can also buy them on the internet. If you go to a fortune cookie website, you can write your own messages to go in the cookies, and you can choose from different colours and sizes. People buy fortune cookies to give to guests at birthday parties, weddings and other special occasions.