Ina Garten Reveals Why She Never Wanted to Have Kids: ‘That Was the Choice I Made’

Food Network star Ina Garten loves to create recipes for people to enjoy with their families, but the one thing she never did was have a child of her own. Even though she’s been married to Jeffrey Garten since 1968, Ina, 74, says having children with him was never on her agenda.

“It’s a choice, and that was the choice I made,” she revealed to Katie Couric on her podcast in April 2017. “I really appreciate that other people do [have children], and we will always have friends that have children that we are close to, but it was a choice I made very early.”

“I really felt, I feel, that I would have never been able to have the life I’ve had,” she continued. When Katie, who’s a proud mom to her two kids — Elinor, 30, and Caroline, 26 — asked Ina if she ever felt judged by other parents, the celebrity chef admitted that she was never looked down upon.

“I never felt that people did,” the Make It Ahead author explained. “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.”

For Ina, Jeffrey, 75, is all she needs and she wouldn’t have it any other way. The pair met when the A Cold Peace author was still a student at Dartmouth College. He ran into the brunette beauty when she was visiting her brother at the school.

“He saw me walking around the campus and he said to his roommate, ‘I wonder who that girl is.’ Now you have to understand Dartmouth was all men at that time so I was like the only girl walking around,” Ina hilariously explained to Katie, 65. “It wasn’t like I was Elle Macpherson walking around Dartmouth and six months later he showed up at my doorstep, which is amazing that he remembered.” Aww!

Who needs kids when Ina has a loving husband waiting at home?