• 01.122 especially in food-supplies,

I am struck by this passage.  Thorin explains that the dwarves of the mountain didn’t bother to grow or hunt food for themselves, since they could very easily be paid in food for their amazing work.  That seems a recipe for disaster.  If this is true, then the drive to work things out peacefully with the people of Dale would be foundational to any child of any leading house of that community.  Do we take the dwarves as a sub-community of the larger Long Lake region, as we would a monastery providing medicine and prayer to a medieval village upon whose farming they depend?  If you don’t have food, about two days of siege would lose you all your gold.  Can one of our Word Fans point us to scholarly work or speculative fiction on the subject?

This word is attested in OED both with and without hyphens.

“food, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2017, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/72632. Accessed 13 September 2017.