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They each sit next to a fortune cookie machine, and the scene is strictly Willy Wonka meets Dickens: spigots squirt out circles of batter, which are then whisked on a conveyor belt into a dark tunnel lit by blue gas flames.
Another paper focused on a more prosaic explanation: geographic proximity. New York City’s Lower East Side, which three-quarters of all Jewish immigrants who arrived between 1880 and 1920 passed through, was only a fifteen-minute walk from Chinatown, notes Hanna R. Miller in a paper titled “Identity Takeout: How American Jews Made Chinese Food Their Ethnic Cuisine.” That proximity encouraged culinary crossover.
The splintered history may explain one puzzling phenomenon: Fold-Pak boxes from the East and West Coasts of the United States are made slightly differently. On the East Coast, the wire always runs the short length of the box; on the West Coast, it runs the long way. In Texas you’ll see both.
Kari-Out, which is owned by a Jewish family, rose to its prominence in the Chinese-restaurant business from a humble start in soy sauce. Today the factory operates seven days a week, three shifts a day, churning out millions of packets a year.
