The fortune cookie is an American-Chinese creation with Japanese roots. Japan had a similar cookie by the 19th century, and temples sold random fortunes called omikuji. In Japan, the paper slip was tucked into the bend of a cookie called tsujiura senbei, still sold in some regions. In the US, Makoto Hagiwara of San Francisco's Japanese Tea Garden is said to have served the modern version in the early 1900s, while Los Angeles's David Jung claimed he invented it in 1918. Cookies were made by hand until Edward Louie's late-1960s machine allowed mass production.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.