The occupation of the Peter Cooper Suite was longer and less dramatic than similar protests carried out in 2009 at New York University, where 18 students who occupied a cafeteria for two days were suspended, and at the New School, where the police used pepper spray and arrested 22 people who university officials said had entered a building unlawfully.
A few hours later, Mr. Emanuel's campaign invited the news media to watch him buy lunch at a Hyde Park cafeteria for two South Side volunteers, including a man he described as the most prolific signature gatherer for his bid to succeed Mayor Richard M. Daley.
Alaa al-Kurd, who runs a makeshift cafeteria for three months every summer, said shisha smokers made up 70 percent of his customers.
Their instructor, Herma Markland, who has managed the cafeteria for eight years, teaches them the importance of punctuality and to work together: collaboration is important in a kitchen.
Before that, back in 2011, he visited Lebanon, where he worked in a cafeteria for nine months, then returned to Syria.
At the Pace University campus in Lower Manhattan, the city took the unusual step of closing the main cafeteria altogether for two meal periods last month, touching off a student boycott when it reopened.
The ruling would force Hartford to pay cafeteria workers for three hours of overtime for each day the program runs.
Ms. Rosenthal, for example, had to give only a few particulars of her child's eye view of her mother -- as a glamorous looking woman who served food in a Brooklyn school cafeteria -- for three ensemble members to assemble an immediate vision of boys lining up to have their plates filled by a ladle-wielding femme fatale.
At a cafeteria table for four, Mrs. Dater, who lives in Ramsey, N.J., began: "One of the things we've learned through the six and a half months we've been here " and stopped when she heard a gasp.
She's like a chick peeping out of its shell for the first time, trying to develop context for a different culture, multiples of cultures, existing outside, stuff that hasn't even been on her radar before: the cafeteria workers, for one, or the idea of a profession as something that one does for pleasure as well as payment.
It is a scene that could unfold on any given taco Tuesday in any school cafeteria, save for one crucial difference: Jalen has cerebral palsy and is unable to speak; his testy remarks come not from his mouth but from a machine called a DynaVox, mounted on his joystick-controlled wheelchair.
