I first learned of the story below while watching this speech by former New York Times writer Jennifer 8. Lee at a TED conference. The video I linked to is 18 minutes long but worth every second. It's a scaled down version of a tome's worth of information, quite literally: Lee, inspired by the below, traveled around the world to find out more, and in the end, authored The Fortune Cookie Chronicles -- a history of what Americans call Chinese Food. -- Dan



The Luckiest Dessert in History

Powerball, a multi-state lottery, has unique rules. Players pick six numbers: five which they hope will match five randomly selected white balls; plus one additional number which they hope will match a randomly selected red ball (the Powerball). Any player who successfully predicts all six balls correctly wins the jackpot. The odds of hitting the jackpot? One in over 195 million. However, correctly predicting the five white balls only results in a large prize itself, currently $200,000. The odds here? One in 5,138,133.



But something went wrong during March 30, 2005 Powerball drawing. One hundred and ten people hit those one-in-five million odds, winning, collectively, almost $20 million dollars. Immediately, officials assumed rampant fraud. They plotted the winner's locations on a map, and, seeing no obvious patterns, dug deeper. What they found wasn't fraud. It was food. Specifically, fortune cookies.



Wonton Food, Inc., in New York, makes fortune cookies. A lot of them, in fact, with distribution across the country. They print up thousands of copies of each fortune, replete with lucky numbers. And as luck would have it, one of these sets of numbers exactly matched the five white balls in that week's Powerball drawing. One hundred and ten people played those numbers -- and finding no fraud in the end, Powerball officials concluded that these 110 lucky Chinese food fans were indeed winners.



Bonus fact : Fortune cookies aren't Chinese desserts, historically. They're Japanese.







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