D&D is not, not has it ever been a realistic Earth simulator. Literally the ONLY reason halflings couldn't grow the spices they would need on their own farms is if the GM decided that they couldn't. There is no "lore" laying out irrigation requirements , crop availability, or any of that garbage you are trotting out.
Know how I know that halflings grow everything they need on a self sufficient farm to be excellent creators of foodstuffs? Because BOOM I just willed it to be so as the GM. Absolutely zero problem.
I don't know why you quoted
this post of mine & then edited out the quote but whatever... Throw a big clump of cactusbeside the frozen climber bodies while running Rhime of the frostmaiden & players are going to so view it as so obviously out of place that finding their investigation into how the cactus plants are magically thriving ends with
"Because BOOM I just willed it to be so as the GM" is unlikely to go over well. That player reaction is probably going to be even worse so if this is not the first time they ran into that level of planning as the increasingly starfish alien style halflings.
Those same players don't need perfect realism or an advanced botany degree to know that different crops grow in different areas. It doesn't take a professor of history to remember that there was
some reason why pepper & silk were valuable imported trade goods in Europe that is still today not something grown or farmed locally for most of the world. That level of completely unpredictable & alien might be fine for your game, but it introduces multiple problems. First if just anyone can trivially grow trade goods there is no longer any reason for them to have value & your salt pepper silk weeds will confuse players why those are removed from trade goods or remove their ability to feel any familiarity they can compare to while attempting to see the world from the mindset of their character. Second you seem to have gone full loonytoons cartoon world to answer the question of why halflings force intelligent creature with free will to treat halfling settlements like the floor is lava children's game. Someone else suggested that a
druid could grow pepper wherever & that was reasonable, but we were talking about a
farmer who decided to grow his own pepper on top of everything else he & his family eats because they don't engage in trade and do engage in trade and don't use a cart while doing it and do use a cart in order to avoid making roads or paths because someone raised the problem of why the halflings are not at least as serious about dangerous wildlife & bandits as farmers at a similar point in history when d&d has much more dangerous even thinking monsters as part of good faith discussion & someone else raised the problem of why halflings force everyone else to not show any interest in bettering themselves & those they care about through the advancement of civilization as romans mongols & others did through good faith discussion. Those starfish alien halflings are indeed outrageous because there was an attempt to invoke "
BOOM I just willed it to be so as the GM" to ignore the discussion &
dismiss both posters.
Remember they are only growing pepper because the dismissal fell apart over the extremely reasonable expectation of them enjoying "generous meals" that at least use exotic spices like salt & pepper but would need to trade for simple things like salt or pepper for those meals & couldn't due to the fact that don't engage in trade but do engage in trade while not engaging in trade and actually engaging in trade in such a way that they never risk forming a path that a reasonably skilled bandit ranger could
possibly find with their skills while actively looking for it so a near complete lack of interest in self preservation can be preserved in a world where dangerous animals bandits or even monsters exist in any amount north of zero.
That might sound confusing, and it is. Unfortunately someone was trying to throw out unbelievable extremes to dismiss two different reasonable problems raised by two different posters engaging in good faith discussion & in doing so created a totally unbelievable situation that lights suspension of disbelief on fire for each problem by cranking the dial for the other well past 11.
Perhaps you can tell me about how dwarves can't have a mining subculture because the sludge and runoff from the ore processing would poison their groundwater and they would all die of radon poisoning.
There are a number of things I could say if a player ever asked because dwarves don't shun everything about advancement of civilization magic & industry like the shire halflings... "They don't shun magic & have quite the reputation for crafting magic items. Also their cities don't tend to be literally inside raw mines even if they live underground. Their settlements use extensive purification enchantments." The shire halfling monoculture by comparison doesn't notably use magic, avoids crafting, & aren't known as super druid farmers either.
On this specific note I actually had it come up in a way. the players found an abandoned subterranean ancient dhakaani city for plot reasons & initially one player voiced a reasonable concern of checking the air in case it was bad after thousands of years being abandoned all sealed up. Much like the dwarves above the dhakaani did use those kinds of enchantments & at least one eberron source makes note of it so the players were intrigued to discover that the air seemed cleaner than it was outside the seal. After investigating this specific curiosity the players found evidence of these large scale enchantments & proceeded to spend quite a few sessions trying to beg borrow & bribe skilled arcanists & researchers into reverse engineering the enchantments with the goal of getting rich while establishing/managing a small company town & its problems as exploration of the city progressed. All of that was possible because there were reasonable understandable reasonings & motives the players could process to consider "how would my pc react to this"
Maybe about how tritons all suffer from severe scurvy because they lack some vitamin C in the form of citrus fruits in their diet?
When was the last time you saw vitaminC noted prominently on a bag of dog or cat food?...
Probably never because
"The cells of nearly all animals on the planet make plenty of their own vitamin C and thus have no need for it in their diets. Humans and other primates are pretty unique in our need to have vitamin C in our diet."* That's fine if you didn't know that & declared tritons considered fruit a valuable commodity or got it from some other aquatic source too. Either of those would be something players can easily understand & make plans around knowing in being part your world. Those triton orange deliveries are very different from shrodinger's cart/wagon for halflings that don't but do engage in trade that the rest of the world just ignores like lava. You could also say any number of other things such as "vitaminc is not discovered as a distinct thing so nobody ever looked into if it's a problem or why not if not" or even "I'm not sure how investigating that could be enjoyable for the group and there's that actual problem you know of".
Or perhaps in your world elves suffer mass amounts of depression and mental illness because they live lifespans of 800 years and all their friends of other races are doomed to die around them and their mindnumbingly boring existence of spending 200 years learning to weave baskets.
This one is easy & at least one eberron source goes into a bit of detail on it.
Here's a nice podcast episode on some of it too with the "perfected skill" jumplink being the part that particularly gets into the basket. I'm not thrilled about the rather setting specific elves that leave out eberron & darksun elves in the phb either, but a least they come closer to fitting settings that are very different from FR than halflings by making some attempt to embrace things like magicn rather than trying to opt out of the d&d world of "medieval Europe with magic stapled on haphazardly" itself as phb shire halflings do.
How stuff happened on Earth isn't how stuff happens in a fantasy world.
You went a good bit beyond "fantasy world" & deep into random unknowable world in the last throes of
"Because BOOM I just willed it to be so as the GM" bleeding to death on the razor's edge of slipping into the point of causing the players themselves to succumb to the madness that stems from lovecraft style noneuclidean geometry of the elder gods.
* you should maybe consider one of the many brands of dog food that understand canine dietary needs other than that one if you do & your degree equipped vet didn't prescribe it for some strange condition.
