Frustrated with the South Dining hall renovations, South and West quad residents are defecting to North Dining hall in droves.
Hordes of formerly impassioned defenders of South Dining Hall have been spotted at North, waiting in the absurdly long line for the Boom Boom Chicken.
I cry foul! Did we give up on the Irish after they put us through a gut-wrenching 0-2 start? No! We closed ranks! We cursed them, maybe. We cried ourselves to sleep, maybe. But we stood up when it mattered. When Purdue came to town in week four, we showed up!
Where is this spirit of loyalty come dinner time?
Perhaps the dining hall truly is a utilitarian feature of our day-to-day life. In, eat, out, repeat. But I don’t believe that for a second.
Dining hall allegiances are about more than the food. You won’t find a campus eatery that can rival South Dining Hall’s history and culture. Friends, let me take you on a journey.
The Great Milk Riot of ‘52
In the prehistoric era, meals were served family style and lasted exactly 25 minutes. Students were required to wear a suit and tie to dine. They were also limited to just five 10-ounce glasses of milk a day (I know!).
In 1952, penny-pinching administrators made the “pour” decision to reduce the size of the two dinnertime milk glasses to eight ounces.
For those humanities majors (of which I am one), that is a reduction from 50 to 46 ounces a day. Four whole ounces! The travesty!
Apparently the student body shared my melodrama, because they didn’t cow down.
They took to the aisles in a day that has gone down in the (obscure) history books as The Great Milk Riot of ‘52!
It was udder chaos! A full on moo-tiny! The entire student body set out to destroy the offending cups. The new thicker, squatter cups put up a good fight. The students couldn’t crack them!
But there to save the day was the Notre Dame Bowling Team!
In a 100% true story, the bowling team stacked milk glass pyramids at the ends of the long dining tables. They’d roll glass after glass into a tenpin formation of glasses. The technique was apparently quite effective.
The actual number of shattered glasses is quite contested. The New York Times reports two numbers: One is from the university, which sets the total number at 100 glasses. Sure bud. The second tally comes from the student-operated radio station WND, which boasted of 800 glasses shattered.
So you can guess which number we’re going to go with here. C’mon. For a legen-dairy tale like this, we’re going to milk it for all it’s worth.
Mooved by their students’ passion (or simply having no more eight-ounce glasses to use) the dining hall returned to 10-ounce glasses that very week. Victory!
Ahoy Matey!
There have been other colorful moments over the years. Who could forget the great meat tenderizer incident of ‘54? Spoiler: It didn’t go quite as south as the name perhaps suggests.
The Captain Crunch sit-in of ‘83 was featured in the pages of The Wall Street Journal. Frustrated with the lack of captain crunch, nearly two dozen students linked arms and blocked access to the serving area until their demands were heard.
North even got in on the fun by throwing a surprise party that shall henceforth be known as the great diarrhea bash of ‘68. At the risk of venturing into some very unappetizing puns, all 500 lucky invitees left feeling quite upset.
The students, as all gracious guests should, thanked their host the next day by “kick[ing] over tables, stacks of glasses and plates and [then] pelting the walls with cream puffs.”
Where’s my Liverwurst?!?
Notre Dame used to have a fine tradition called “Gripe Nights” which are more or less exactly what they sound like. Pursuing these meeting notes remind us of how far we’ve come and how far left we have to go.
Consider the 1984 proposal that “Dining halls should serve bananas for breakfast more often.”
Anonymous student from the class of 1980-something, I heartily invite you to 2025. It’s bananapalooza in South. All day every day. They are a little on the small side, though.
Other issues have been indefensibly ignored for the last four decades. Perhaps most egregiously, the “lack of liverwurst in the dining halls” has yet to be addressed. This is the kind of issue that keeps us up at night. Where’s my liverwurst!?
For the love of the dining hall!
When we dine in South, we are dining at the site where our first friendships were deepened! Of our post-midterm group therapy sessions!
We are dining on a one-time graveyard of eight-ounce milk glasses!
We are dining on the battlefield of our ancestral brothers and sisters who risked expulsion to secure our novelty cereal dispensers! Our mini bananas! Our liverwurst!
But by all means, go to North. Nothing is more appetizing than dining on what was once an extemporary cesspool of human excrement. I say this with all due respect to their admittedly fantastic chocolate-chip cookie bar.
Viva La South Dining Hall!
Danny Baribeau is a freshman studying English. He is from Holliston, Mass. - but more importantly, he lives in O’Neill Family Hall. You’ve probably seen him running around Saint Joseph’s Lake, or grilling steaks with the Knights of Columbus. You can reach out to Danny at dbaribea@nd.edu.
