Ina Garten has spoken candidly about the reason she chose not to have children.
The 75-year-old cookbook author, who’s been married to Jeffrey Garten since 1968, opened up about her family during a recent interview with BBC News. Speaking to Garten, TV presenter Katty Kay asked her how she ultimately came to the decision to not have children.
“You knew you wanted to get married but you didn’t want children,” Kay said. “Did you know you couldn’t do what you want to do if you had them?” In response, Garten said: “I think it’s much harder. I don’t think that’s why I made the decision.”
She specified that she’s had the opportunity to reflect on her family life, before revealing that her experiences throughout her childhood were the main reason she didn’t want to become a mother.
“I’m actually writing a memoir right now and I’m kind of looking back at my childhood. It was nothing I wanted to recreate,” she explained. “And I’m always looking forward to look back and realise a lot of my decisions were based on my childhood. And so I think that was really the motivating factor. And Jeffrey and I were just so happy together.”
Garten then shared her advice for fans who may be in the midst of trying to figure out what choices they want to make in their own lives.
“Everybody wants to know: ‘Where am I going to end up?’ Forget where you’re going to end up. You don’t know where you’re going to end up,” she said. “All you know is that if you jump in the pond and you splash around, while you’re there you’re going to look around and go: ‘Oh that’s really interesting over there. I think I’ll follow it there.’ And see where it brings you.”
This isn’t the first time that Garten has opened up about her personal life. During an appearance on the Katie Couric Podcast in 2017, she described when and how she decided not to have children.
“I really appreciate that other people do, and we will always have friends that have children that we are close to, but it was a choice I made very early,” she said. “I really felt, I feel, that I would have never been able to have the life I’ve had. And so it’s a choice, and that was the choice I made.”
The Barefoot Contessa star also specified that she and her husband never felt judged because they didn’t expand their family. However, she still shared the one way that she and Jeffrey couldn’t relate to some of their friends who have children.
“I think the one thing that we miss is a lot of people’s friends are the parents of their kids’ friends. So we never had that connection with other people that I see, that network. But no I never felt judged by it - maybe people did but I didn’t notice,” she said.
Over the years, Garten has also opened up about her childhood, including her relatonship with her mother growing up. During an appearance on Al Roker’s Cooking Up A Storm podcast in 2021, the chef said that when she was a child, her mother wouldn’t allow her to cook in the kitchen.
“I don’t know, I think my mother just wanted me in my room and she wanted the kitchen to herself,” she said. “She said: ‘It’s your job to study, it’s my job to cook. Get out of the kitchen.’ So I kind of always wanted to do it.”
She specified that she later taught herself to cook by reading Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and practising every night. In the process, she came to the realisation that she wanted to cook for her “work and not just for fun”. Garten also added that her passion for cooking as a child was tied to another thing: wanting to connect with people.
“I think what I was craving as a child was connecting with people and I felt that if you feed them, they always show up and you have a good time together,” she said. “That was the connection I loved so, I kept doing it over and over again.”
During her 2017 appearance on Couric’s podcast, she also recalled how her mother, who was a dietitian, would restrict her from eating particular foods during her childhood. “My mother was obsessive about food. So we weren’t allowed any carbs, we weren’t allowed any butter. We had margarine. And her idea of a great dessert was an apple,” she said at the time.
