Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
In The Hobbit, the dwarves tell Bilbo that back in the good old days at the Lonely Mountain they were so rich that they never bothered to grow their own food.
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In People's of Middle Earth it says that was because they bought their food.
In the Second Age there was a symbiotic relation with allied men in which food was exchanged for technology. As it happens those were the same men that provided cavalry when they went on campaign because Dwarves were primarily good as infantry.
There are also hints of that in LotR ("All such things they could obtain in traffic") although in that case it wasn't referring primarily to food if I recall.
Basically they had a favorable trade balance with agricultural peoples.