CBS Photo Fail: Fortune Cookie
By Deputy Editor Thea Lim
You gotta laugh or you’ll cry: reader Dov sent us a link to an article about a flight attendant who used Taekwondo to subdue a passenger on a bad trip from too many medical marijuana cookies. The passenger was Chinese-American, so CBS decided to run a photo of fortune cookies and marijuana leaves as illustration for this quirky news bit. Because that’s the only kind of cookie that Chinese people eat, right? Ha! Ha!
As Dov writes:
The story concerns a Chinese-American airline passenger who freaked out on a flight after having a bad reaction for medical marijuana cookies and had to be restrained by a flight attendant with a black belt.
The first two photos are of the flight attendant (in her gi) and the Chinese-American passenger. The third photo shows fortune cookies and a marijuana leaf.
Nowhere in the article does it say that the medical marijuana cookies were fortune cookies. The choice to use fortune cookies seems to be solely due to the race of the passenger.
I don’t know about baked good with drugs in them. (Really. I swear) But I do know that fortune cookies are a task and a half to make. Dear CBS, haven’t you heard that along with a ravenous appetite for fortune cookies, Chinese people also love efficiency? No Chinese person worth their salt would spend hours making marijuana fortune cookies when they could just make Sara Lee brownies out of a box…(/sarcasm)
While we’re on the topic, I should mention that fortune cookies are not exactly a good illustration of Chineseness. Fortune cookies, while based on a Japanese prototype, are actually 100% American. From Wikipedia:
Makoto Hagiwara of Golden Gate Park’s Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco is reported to have been the first person in America to have served the American version of the cookie when he did so at the tea garden in 1890s or early 1900s. The fortune cookies were made by a San Francisco bakery, Benkyodo.[2][3][4]
David Jung, founder of the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles, has made a competing claim that he invented the cookie in 1918…
Seiichi Kito, the founder of Fugetsu-do of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, also claims to have invented the cookie…
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Photo courtesy of – of course – CBS. Happy Lunar New Year to you too, jerks!
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Deaf Indian Muslim Anarchist wrote:
Fortune cookies are American… and the passenger was Chinese American. So what’s the problem here? You’d rather they ran a photo with something that was explicitly Chinese in origin?
Posted 11 Feb 2010 at 11:33 am ¶
Lola wrote:
I’m tired of the medias unending race fail
Posted 11 Feb 2010 at 12:17 pm ¶
steps wrote:
Sigh. Face palm. Headdesk. Every show of exasperation you could think of, I just did. But I’m curious as to WHY they have a stock photo of marijuana leaves and fortune cookies in the first place.
On a side note, I don’t know about baked goods with drugs in them either. People are usually quite shocked and I don’t know what that says about me.
Posted 11 Feb 2010 at 1:33 pm ¶
doudc wrote:
I’d like to shake the person who did this and ask WHY she or he thought this would be acceptable. It makes absolutely no damn sense. SMH.
Posted 11 Feb 2010 at 1:43 pm ¶
Renee wrote:
Actually, fortune cookies do not take hours to make. You have to move quickly to get them to come out correctly; however, the idea that just because someone is Chinese means that they would make pot fortune cookies definitely has its basis in racism. I think apot brownies would be far more expedient, but such a confectionery delight would have been far to normalizing and heavens knows the media is about creating people of colour as “other”
Posted 11 Feb 2010 at 1:54 pm ¶
Thea Lim wrote:
@Renee
Haha, you must be a better Chinese person than me
It takes me a long time to make fortune cookies!
Posted 11 Feb 2010 at 2:50 pm ¶
Just A Thought wrote:
Wow, this is ridiculous. As if tripping on a plane isn’t ridiculous enough, they just had to show that “see, this crazy foreigner was wildin’ out” and prove it with an idiotic pic.
And, really, brownies or cookies would have been better, because everyone I know that knows how to make pot-infused baked goods are white American college students.
Posted 11 Feb 2010 at 3:29 pm ¶
Phil wrote:
Did you read the first comment? How does he know the guy was 5 feet tall? A little prejudice perhaps?
Posted 11 Feb 2010 at 4:43 pm ¶
Chris wrote:
I don’t know about this. Could someone please explain? If this were part of a historical slur, eg joking about black people eating watermelon or ribs, I’d get it. But I don’t know of any similar jokes involving Asians & fortune cookies. So, without the historical basis I don’t get it. Or is the argument just that associating any imagery with an ethnic group–even an image benign by itself–is racist, prima facie?
Posted 11 Feb 2010 at 6:47 pm ¶
Thea Lim wrote:
@DIMA
No, ha! The question is why did the run anything “Chinese” to begin with? The bit about fortune cookie history was to point out that, adding insult to injury, fortune cookies are not actually Chinese.
Posted 11 Feb 2010 at 8:13 pm ¶
Dawn. wrote:
Yet another mainstream media race fail. Will they never get it together?? I guess it’s just too much fun depicting people of color as “other.” So thanks, CBS, for keeping the party going.
Posted 11 Feb 2010 at 10:41 pm ¶
Medusa wrote:
Ugh.
@DIMA-Really? If they ran a story about you, you’d appreciate it if they put a picture of a bowl of curry? The ethnicity of the passenger has absolutely nothing to do with the story, and all CBS has helped to do is perpetuate stereotypes and continue to other Asian-Americans. Of course, why wouldn’t they run it with a photo of a fortune cookie? He’s not a regular person after all, he’s ASIAN and they have to make sure to how ASIAN he is!
Posted 12 Feb 2010 at 8:26 am ¶
Perpetual Explosion wrote:
This whole story sounds sketchy. As someone who is somewhat acquainted with the effects of marijuana, aggressively wilding out appears to be quite low on the list of probable things people tend to want to do while high, right between flossing with razor wire (#369) and striking up a casual conversation with a policeman (#371.) I could be wrong, I’ve smoked a hell of a lot of weed, and I’ve only tried the brownies once, so they could have a different effect, but all the testimony I’ve heard about edibles seems to suggest that they produce an even more relaxed high than smoking.
Posted 13 Feb 2010 at 11:43 pm ¶