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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6531936" data-attributes="member: 4937">Dale was the principle supplier of food to Erebor.  And it's easy to see that - even in the aftermath of the Dragon - the descendants of Dale were still prominent traders in agricultural products, acting as middle men between the wood elf Kingdom in the North, and the province of Dorwinnen in the south.  It would not be unreasonable to assume that they also traded with the Dwarves of the Iron Mountains and even at the extent of their range the men of Rhun to the east.  And as the text points out, there are far more people (humans and even hobbits) living in the portions of the map marked as 'wild' as people from places like the Shire actually believe.The movies are evidence of nothing.  IMO they are best ignored.The internal evidence of the text is that Laketown was a major hub in the agricultural trade.  The elves were clearly buying wine, apples, butter, and other goods from Laketown.  Some of it - such as apples and grain - was probably produced locally.  Others, like the wine, was explicitly in the text brought up the river from Gondor.  We can presume that tea and similar commodities was being exported in from Rhun via some sort of 'silk road', and coffee likely up from as far away as Far Harad.  All of this is implied by the text just not usually explicitly called out, but at times the vast largely invisible web of traders that make the economy of middle earth run is an important plot point of The Lord of the Rings, as when the Hobbits find barrels of premium Shire tobacco in the ruin of Isengard.  It's implied from the text that the Baggins became wealthy as grocers, and it seems highly likely to me that the Sackville-Baggins represent a union in marriage of the Shire's two most prominent grocery families, producing a virtual monopoly on the storage and distribution of food stuffs (mills, warehouses, transport, etc.).  Tolkien had the heart of a DM.  Erebor and all of Middle Earth was intended to be completely internally consistent.</blockquote>

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