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If you haven't started yet, you might want to sign up for DL now. Unlike NW, DL actually has (up to now) had some really nice bonuses several times a year. NW has had none that I can recall on the dining side for a long time (however, it has had some multi-partner promos on the NW side where you could use dining).

If Delta runs more bonuses this year and Northwest doesn't (before the FFPs merge), then you could end up with more net miles after the merge by dining with Delta through any bonus periods than with NW.

As of last spring I didn't have any miles with Delta. Then I read (on FT) about a 4k Delta SkyMiles signup bonus for Starwood members. I was neither, but I signed up for Starwood, then immediately signed up for Delta. Then I got a 5k DL bonus for signing up for their Amex with first year fee waived (yet used it for nothing but home improvement stores and the dining program dines). Then there were some 1-day car rentals that netted 1000 bonus DL miles each, while they would have netted 50 elsehwere. Then there was a dining promo called Coast to Coast that netted me 5k bonus miles. And so on...

And that's missing the 25k bonus miles I couldn't easily earned with the DL dining program some months before I joined DL.

All this during a time when there were no NW bonuses in these areas that it made sense for me to pursue. (Last time I earned any bonus miles with NW was a year ago with Mystery Miles on hotels. I do have to explain that neither NW nor DL are my primary program. Both are ones I only add to when the bonuses are better than elsewhere.)

As results of this (and some other bonus-spurred activity in other areas) I have about 35k miles with Delta that will now merge with my 140k-ish NW miles (if the merge was today). And based on the recent pattern, if I get to over 200k combined by the time they merge, it'll all be due to DL, not NW, bonuses.