All of the world's ethnic cuisines include traditional dishes that are made from raw foods.

In Latin America, there is guacamole, cabbage salad, gazpacho, and young coconut water.

In India and the Middle East, there are chutneys and spicy salads of herbs and diced vegetables.

In Italy, there are pestos and delicious green salads.

And with a little creativity, you can also make raw versions inspired by many of your favorite cooked ethnic foods. Some of my favorite cooked-turned-raw inventions include eggplant pizzas, zucchini pasta marinara, living lasagna, sunflower felafel, quinoa tabouli, shaved beet salad with almond gorgonzola, grandma's coleslaw with coconut mayonnaise, sweet potato pie, and german chocolate cake. Once you get a feel for the way raw ingredients and seasonings work, you can look through all your favorite ethnic cookbooks and invent an endless number of raw recipes.

To get started, practice observation when you are at restaurants, traveling, or looking in cookbooks, and you'll be amazed at the ideas you get. For example, my favorite salad at Coco Pazzo in Chicago (one of my favorite Italian restaurants) is a salad with thinly shaved pickled beets arranged on a platter, topped with mesclun greens, candied walnuts, blue cheese, and a balsamic vinaigrette. To create a raw version, I used thinly sliced, marinated raw beets, made an almond cheese with dulse flakes that looks and tastes like blue cheese, made candied walnuts in my dehydrator, and used an orange juice based dressing. It was incredible! You'll be surprised to find that the raw versions you invent have even more flavor and color than the cooked originals. In many cooked dishes, you are mostly tasting the seasonings, but in raw dishes, you taste the full flavor of the food itself.