With LVNGbook, Gastronomy Alum Shaun Chavis Provides Custom Guide to Eating Healthy

Eating and cooking are personal endeavors. Not only do we each have our distinct cultures and individual preferences as they relate to food, there’s also the element of health to consider, like dietary restrictions and allergies.

Enter LVNGbook, a platform that helps users build their own custom cookbook, tailored to their particular needs. Shaun Chavis (MET’06), an alum of the Metropolitan College Master’s in Gastronomy and Certificate in the Culinary Arts programs, spoke about LVNGbook with Bostonia as part of the magazine’s My Big Idea series. The idea came to Chavis after an experience with a friend, who had been diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder and was struggling with changing her diet to improve her health. The moment brought about a realization. “I thought, it should not be this hard to change the way you eat for your health for the rest of your life. It should not be this traumatic,” Chavis explained.

With LVNGbook, Chavis sought to blend the satisfying experience of spending time in the kitchen with a beloved cookbook with the technological convenience needed to meet the responsive needs of managing dynamic dietary demands. “I thought, what if we had a platform where instead of getting a list from the doctor, you could create a profile with your health needs and preferences, and get a personalized cookbook of recipes already modified for your needs? All you have to do is cook; you don’t have to figure out how to change all of your favorite recipes and where to find the products.”

Chavis brought her fellow gastronomy alum, Priya Shah (MET’12), aboard to handle customer research and marketing strategy, and in 2019 LVNGbook was launched. For Chavis and Shah, the opportunity to make custom, one-of-kind cookbooks wasn’t just a way to promote positive associations with healthy eating, but also a way to bring about better health outcomes for those from historically marginalized communities and provide them with improved, more bespoke dining options than the Eurocentric fare often recommended by nutritionists. As Shah told Bostonia, “There are cultures all over the world that have been [eating healthfully] for centuries. And we don’t acknowledge that these traditional foodways are actually healthy options. So, that’s what inspired me about LVNGbook, and why I really wanted to join Shaun—to be able to amplify and share that with the world. Nutrition is changing, the way we eat is changing, but there are still some traditional things that we shouldn’t let go.”