I ate a fortune cookie not long ago, as I do when offered them by restaurants and takeout places that offer them. Also, I read the fortune, as a form of very low-grade entertainment.

Something I knew about fortune cookies: their origin seems to trace from Japan, Kyoto in fact, a place that’s long been inventive when it comes to confections. I’ve sampled some of the traditional products in the small, wonderfully colorful shops of that city.

“The idea that fortune cookies come from Japan is counterintuitive, to say the least,” wrote Jennifer 8. Lee in the New York Times some years ago, an article I remember seeing before. Maybe so, but ideas and inventions travel and morph, in this case to California for an association with Chinese food by the 20th century.

“The Japanese may have invented the fortune cookie,” she quotes Derrick Wong, the vice president of the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the world, Wonton Food, based in Brooklyn. “But the Chinese people really explored the potential of the fortune cookie. It’s Chinese-American culture. It only happens here, not in China.”

Which brings me to the wisdom in my most recent fortune cookie, from a bakery in Chicago. Seven words, entirely sic:

Being an able man. There are always.

Glad to see that fortune-cookie writing, in this case, has been outsourced to someone whose native language isn’t English. Entirely possible in polyglot Chicago. I can’t say what language they do speak, but I’m certain of that.