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[CaterpillarEater]

My fortress just got its first baron and I assigned him a dining room.  He picked up some food and is running circles in his dining room. There are tables and chairs in there and yet he refuses to eat.  He has been doing this for a couple of in-game weeks and I am afraid he will starve to death.  What should I do?

[Tomcost]

The answer is pretty simple: nothing. Why would you want him to live?

Anyway, if you want to save him, try to unassign that room and see if he eats in the communal dinning hall. If that works, debuild everything in his personal room and build them again, maybe in a different fashion. I don't know the causes of that bug, but it's probable that it will help.

[Garath]

is he assigned a burrow somewhere? He might be trying to eat somewhere, see that it is outside the burrow, try to bring the food back, stockpile also outside the burrow and start to kind of run around. Just release him from every burrow, job or whatever. His dining hall is only for show, he can still eat with the plebs. Usually, when something like this happened it's something the player did and the required action is to undo whatever you did that might help him or did before he got hungry. Again, this behavior looks a lot like a baron who was burrowed to speak to a diplomat or something and is now looking for a place he is allowed to eat

[Larix]

I've seen dwarfs bouncing around tables with food a few times, and there are no burrows involved. I think it happens when the furniture of the dining room changes while the dwarf is on its way there - they'll oscillate between chairs and apparently can't decide which one to use. Yanking out the most recently added tables/chairs usually unsticks them.

If you fulfil a noble's basic room requirements (not doing so is likely to drive them mad), they _will_ use their dining room to eat and won't eat in the common hall. A dwarf will always prefer eating while sitting on a chair they own. You can make a dining room without a chair, making it impossible to eat there, but a noble will require an office, which must be defined from a chair. If the noble can't eat in the dining room, they'll sit down in the office to eat and likely get unhappy over it.

[Dwarfu]

This is a known issue (bug #4051).  Note this report doesn't have a save indicating the problem, so if you could upload a save to http://dffd.wimbli.com and post a link in the report, it would be helpful.

[Telgin]

Just to add to the comments about burrows and eating: in .31.25 at least I've observed dwarves leaving burrows to eat and drink.  I don't know if that's intended behavior, or was fixed in .34.x, but I routinely saw two dwarves leave a burrow I set up for the two of them to get food and drink once they got hungry or thirsty enough.

So I'm much more inclined to believe it's related to the furniture, as pointed out by Larix.