Sunday, December 2, 1956. 5:30 p.m. South Quad: The cafeteria line, Kelsey-Reeves Dining Hall

First one man, then another, shakes his head at the main dish (Corned Beef and Swiss Cheese on Lettuce) and takes only the Fruit Salad in Lime Jello on Lettuce, the Pineapple-Graham-Cracker Refrigerator Dessert, and milk. Soon a dozen are standing at the end of the line, eyeing the tray of every diner who follows them. Those who have turned down the corned beef are cheered. Any man who has taken it is hissed and booed.

Out at the tables, knives and forks begin to beat a rhythm. A chant begins: “We want good food, no more dog food!” A little band tries to infiltrate the kitchen, shouting “Down with the dietitians!” They are pushed out and the doors are locked.

The protesters move out into the lobby, then through the doors onto Madison, moving toward West Quad across the street.

5:35 p.m. West Quad: Adams-Rumsey Dining Hall

At a single West Quad table, diners begin to pound in unison. (Later, no direct evidence is found to prove collusion between the two dorms, but the timing makes the inference all but incontestable.) The drumbeat spreads through the room and is taken up in the Chicago-Williams Dining Hall next door. Food and plates are piled on serving tables. The noise rises, starts to subside, then explodes as some 200 yelling residents of South Quad pour into West Quad’s courtyard. Snowballs fly toward open windows.

6:00 p.m. South Quad

Workers close the cafeteria lines 15 minutes early. (“I feel we might have had extensive damage if the lines had not been closed,” Joan Schwal, assistant dietitian, tells authorities later.) Hungry late-comers join the protesters in the street.

6:00-6:30 p.m. Madison Street

Students and their parents returning to South and West Quads from the annual holiday performance of Handel’s “Messiah” at Hill Auditorium are pelted with snowballs.A chanting mob of indeterminate size—later estimates range from 150 to 1,200—flows up State Street to the front of the Union, then east in the direction of East Quad.

6:40 p.m. East Quad, North Concourse

Protesters from the western dorms are “received coolly” by diners in East Quad, according to the official report of the Inter-House Council, and add fewer than 20 to their number. Outside, four carloads of Ann Arbor’s finest keep their distance. The crowd makes a left at South University.

6:45. The President’s House, 815 S. University

President Harlan Hatcher is not at home, Walter Rea, dean of men, informs the crowd from the front steps. Take your complaints to your representatives, he says. The crowd disperses. Krazy Jim’s enjoys an especially busy dinner rush.

Sunday evening

Freshmen David Gumenick, Jeffrey Mandel and Roger Gottfried telephone reporters at three Detroit newspapers and the Associated Press.

Monday, December 3-5

Newspapers across the country publish news of a “food riot” at the University of Michigan. Officials declare they have received no complaints about food in the residence halls. Dean Rea assures anxious parents that the press has “grossly misrepresented the incident… We readily admit our inability to compete with mother’s cooking, but the quadrangle staff makes every effort to provide substantial, well-balanced and properly prepared meals.”

Tuesday, December 4

The South Quad Food Committee, appointed several weeks earlier, announces the results of its survey of dorm residents. Among the complaints are smaller portions than the year before; fried eggs “cold, greasy and rubbery;” soft-boiled eggs served raw or hard-boiled; toast served soggy and cold; “extremely poor” coffee cake; “especially distasteful” ham balls; “extremely poor” hamburgers consisting mostly of filler; diluted ketchup, mustard and salad dressing; “substandard” gravy; “poor” ice cream; and food served on dirty dishes.

Four years earlier, in the great panty raid of 1952, Deborah Bacon, the hard-nosed dean of women, had faced down a male mob far larger and more raucous than the food rioters of ’56. She is unimpressed.”Whoever heard of anyone being satisfied with institutional food?” she asks.

January 1957

The organizers are never identified. Gumenick, Mandel and Gottfried are kicked out of South Quad for calling the Detroit papers and thereby doing “a definite disservice to the residence halls and to the University.” “The source of the articles in the newspapers [were] immature, irresponsible and sensation-seeking resident students who I hope are happier in their present quickly found accommodations than they were in our residence halls,” says Leonard A. Schaadt, business manager of the residence hall system.

January-February 1957

Leonard A. Schaadt announces that the University will remove hash from residence hall menus, replace canned orange juice with frozen, and serve a higher grade of beef with “less tough meat and gristle.”

March 2, 1957

The University announces that residence hall diners will have a choice of two meats at every evening meal.

Sources were found chiefly in the papers of the U-M Housing Division, Bentley Historical Library.