From lentil stews to peaches and cream dessert, one University student is serving up good eats online.
David Jones, political science, history and Spanish senior, launched an Internet-based healthy living magazine that is gaining traction.
Jones’ web magazine, Tasty25, provides readers with healthy, easy recipes that can be fixed in 25 minutes or fewer.
It also allows users to submit their own food recipes, which the staff reviews, checks the ingredients to and lists the nutritional information to ensure the meals are up to their standards.
“It really allows people to kick start a healthy lifestyle by giving them healthy meals that taste great,” Jones said.
The website is updated daily or as the group has time in between classes and work to gather the information, he said. Currently, the site is divided into food categories – from gluten-free meals to ethnic dishes – and users can search the database of recipes through keywords and phrases.
Since the site’s inception in February, more than 100 user-submitted recipes have been posted and more are being added daily.
Jones said the magazine began as an effort to support his father, who was trying to eat healthier at the time. After scouring the Internet for tips and recipes for healthy living, he said he couldn’t find a good website that had all of the information he was looking for.
As a result, Jones started his own.
“I believe that health and nutrition is something that we can’t really put a price tag on because that information is out there,” Jones said. “[People] just need to have a way to find it.”
Using his knowledge of coding and marketing, which Jones said he learned through social media, he was able to progress Tasty 25, which now has nearly 1,000 likes on Facebook and about 2,000 followers on Twitter. The website received 45,000 hits in August, he said, and drew more international traffic than United States page views in July.
Tasty 25 is also expanding on a community-level, he said. The magazine partnered with the Whole Foods Market in Towne Center for a back-to-school event, where Jones cooked some of his own recipes for customers in the store.
Jones said he never imagined the magazine would be this big of a success, adding, “I was just really passionate about it … It’s a labor of love for me.”
And that labor is paying off.
Jones said the next step for Tasty 25 is to try to promote health awareness through partnerships with the University Recreation Center and LSU Health Services.
Until then, Jones said he’s working on compiling a list of healthy recipes that University students can make in their dorms.
