RIVER CITY JOURNAL: FORTUNE COOKIES OFFER A SNACK ABOVE THE REST

Ordinarily, food cooked with a piece of paper inside isn't considered terribly appetizing. Not so the Chinese fortune cookie.

Most folks regard fortune cookies the way they do those peppermints that come with your bill at some restaurants. They don't add a lot to the meal.

But fortune cookies deserve a better reputation.

First off, they are edible when fresh. You have probably tasted a stale fortune cookie and decided to swear off Chinese food. Fresh fortune cookies have a distinctive flavor that both satisfies your sweet tooth and refreshes the palate.

And you have always wondered how fortune cookies got their classic shape: a seashell with stomach cramps. Was that an accident whose details are lost in ancient Chinese history? (Please, if you know for a fact that the first Chinese cookie with a fortune in it was made in 1937 by an Italian baker with some leftover spaghetti dough, don't tell anyone.)

And then there are those little slips of paper with inane sayings on them. By and large they don't give most diners much faith in Chinese wisdom, particularly if your fortune turns out to be the same fortune as your dining companion's. But not all fortunes in fortune cookies are silly or trite. Some are philosophical masterpieces. Take the one you got the other night at a Chinese restaurant right here in River City.

After a leisurely meal (there was a large group in the nearby banquet room that occupied most of your server's time), you got your fortune cookies. If you take them seriously, you also have to consider whose cookie is whose. The rule of thumb, you suppose, is the one closest to you is yours. So someone who doesn't know you from Adam grabs a couple of fortune cookies out of a bin and puts them on a plate and delivers them to your table, thereby sealing your fate.

Now are you beginning to take fortune cookies a mite more seriously?

The other night the cookie closest to you had this message: "Your fortune has been completely turned around today."

As you munched on the first half of the cookie, contemplating first the configuration of the crisp morsel and then the words on the paper, you had a sudden chill. This wasn't necessarily a good fortune.

After all, you woke up that morning. Human beings who live long enough one day arrive at a momentous discovery that awaking from a deep sleep is a miracle. And besides waking up, you felt good, ready to deal with the world and its never-ending tests of the human propensity for sin and error.

Did this fortune mean "completely" turned around, or just knocked cockeyed a bit? Because if your fortune had been -- totally without your knowledge, before breaking open that cookie -- reversed, then you were in for trouble. You might not wake up at all the next morning. And even if you did, you might not be capable of slaying life's dragons anymore.

Whenever a free fortune cookie can give you such pause, you know it is time to take stock and make some important decisions. Even before you bit into the second half of the troublesome cookie you had come to this conclusion: It probably really was some negligent spaghetti cook who lost his grocery list in a chunk of dough who made the first Chinese fortune cookie.

You drove home from the restaurant without incident. You went to bed and slept. You awoke the next morning in good health. You ate, you worked, you joked, you tackled some pretty serious stuff. You were just about to decide that the fortune inside the cookie the night before was silly and wrong. That's when it hit you.

Your fortune, indeed, had turned completely around since the previous morning. Up until then you had a decent life. Thanks to that cookie, you became intensely aware of your good fortune. Not bad for a crunchy crust wrapped around a piece of paper, which both your mother and your mother-in-law wonder how many people have touched and did they wash their hands first.

Life goes on for now. Anyone for some cashew chicken and fried rice?

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.