There’s always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.

~~John Updike ~~

I’m first and foremost a writer and a photographer, trying to make sense of a very complicated world.

I’m also a Southerner, transplanted early on from Washington state. I’ve called the South – particularly Virginia – my home region for almost 30 years. My genes are English, descended from some of the earliest settlers at Jamestown, namely Richard Pace and Thomas Lane. Full circle, you might say.

My blog, “Gherkins & Tomatoes,” is not just about one place on Earth – it’s about the universal language of food.

Food always has been a big part of the amazing life I’ve lived. So have cookbooks. I literally live surrounded by walls of cookbooks, over 3500 of them, bookshelves looming like flying buttresses everywhere.

Starting with Peace Corps in Paraguay — then years in Mexico,  Honduras, Haiti, Morocco, and Burkina Faso, working as a nutritionist — with months of traveling in Europe sandwiched in between, all those on-the-ground experiences turned me into a citizen of the world and an admirer of the people who worked impossibly hard every day to feed their families. Although I am a very lapsed Catholic, I still find some of the ancient spirituality a huge help in my day-to-day life, spicing it up with Rumi and Buddhism and other spiritual practices; I am an oblate of St. Meinrad’s Archabbey in southern Indiana and lean toward Thich Nhat Hahn’s theories of mindfulness. After a recent car accident, I’ve become extremely aware of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each breath.

Those experiences underlie everything that I write about, overt or not.

Essentially, it’s all about the eternal search for home, a sort of “culinary exile.“^© 

Here’s where  I indulge my obsession for the life-giving nature of cooking and growing and eating food. My focus is ultimately global and historical. I write about what interests me.

Join me on the journey … .

For more about Cynthia D. Bertelsen, the creator of “Gherkins & Tomatoes,” see Résumé.

To contact Gherkins & Tomatoes, please send an e-mail to gherkinstomatoes@hotmail.com or leave a comment on one of the posts.

Happy to see you here!

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The title of this blog,”Gherkins & Tomatoes,” sprang from the title of the eponymous painting by Spanish painter Luis Melendez’s painting, 1772, Prado, Madrid, one of the first European renditions of tomatoes.

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