[doug*platypus]

The following was boldly swiped from another site during a dawn raid. Many bothans died to get you this information.

Q: Suilad, you guys are doing a great job! In LOTR I hear a mention of tea and I think sugar. Well I know that tea requires warm climates; for I belong to the Indian subcontinent. The realms of Middle-earth were based on the temperatures that prevailed in Europe – or England to be more precise (as Tolkien had planned). So where would our dear hobbits get their tea from? Did they trade with the south (it is mentioned that it is hot there) or were there other means by which they procured tea?

–Beleg Cuthlaion from Pakistan

A: Well, I don’t think this question stops with just tea. Tolkien wrote of some plants and foods that were meant to be distinctly English, giving Middle-earth the impression of "the familiar world" while we find other produce that was incongruous with this same world. What about corn, apples, and tobacco? The issue of agriculture in Middle-earth gets a bit tangled, I’m afraid. The matter is further confused by the FOTR film where we see Pippin and Merry cooking tomatoes up on Weathertop ("That’s nice! Ash in my tomatoes!") – when Tolkien himself never once mentioned tomatoes in the story. So did they exist in Middle-earth? Did regular tea and tobacco, even, exist in this Northern European-based fictional world or did the author just stick them in there? There is a discussion of "cold chicken and pickles" in The Annotated Hobbit where Douglas Anderson talks about Gandalf’s request. The wizard originally asked for tomatoes but Tolkien later changed it to pickles:

This revision brings up the question as to why it should matter whether Bilbo’s larder was stocked with tomatoes or pickles. Tom Shippey, in The Road to Middle-earth, suggests that as Tolkien wrote the sequel to The Hobbit, and as he came to perceive the hobbits and their land as characteristically English in nature, he recognized tomatoes as foreign in origin and in name. They were imports from America, like potatoes and tobacco, which were quickly adopted in England. Though Tolkien does use the word tobacco in The Hobbit a handful of times, it is strictly avoided in The Lord of the Rings, where pipeweed is used. There, as well, potatoes are given the more rustic name taters. Tomatoes were thus out of place in the Shire as Tolkien came to perceive it.
That settles that. No tomatoes. Now what about tea? I think the answer lies in Tolkien’s fictionalization of tobacco, where the author created a proxy for the plant. It seems there was no actual tobacco per se, just his Middle-earth version of tobacco. The plant that came from Númenor was galenas; as Tolkien decided it should be "imported" to Middle-earth and grown in Gondor. It grew in the south of Gondor easily enough but up in the Shire it was carefully handled to survive the climate. Though I have no mind for farming, I would venture a guess that tea had a similar back-history. It probably originated elsewhere (maybe Gondor or further beyond) and was brought up the Greenway. If the clever hobbit farmers of the Shire grew any tea plants similar to the tea of our modern world, lucky them. It seems a rather tricky thing for Tolkien to balance: keeping familiar, English elements associated the hobbits and having to explain at great length (in the case of pipeweed) how these items came to be in the fictional world of Middle-earth.

–Quickbeam

From Green Books, the One Ring.