Ina Garten has opened up about her decision to not have children with her husband, Jeffrey, admitting that starting a family would have made it 'much harder' for her to manage her successful career.

Garten, 78, the famed cook whose show, Barefoot Contessa, ran on the Food Network for over 27 seasons, shared more about her choice in a new interview with The New York Times.

'I think it would have been difficult, and I think Jeffrey and I would have had a different life together,' Garten reflected during the interview.

'I’m not saying it’s a better life or a worse life, but there were times when Jeffrey decided that he wanted to start a business in Japan, and so he moved to Japan,' she continued.

'I was in East Hampton, we went back and forth and we figured it out.'

Garten added that she would not have been able to spend as much time running her specialty food shop, Barefoot Contessa, in East Hampton, had they chosen to have children.

'I think it would have been much harder,' she said.

She also insisted she had no regrets over the decision, explaining: 'I’ve never looked back on the decision and thought, I should have done it differently.

'I understand how my friends have wonderful families, and they really enjoy being parents, but it’s just not something I ever wanted to do.'

'I’m really happy that I didn’t,' the cook added.

During the interview, Garten also opened up about the tumultuous relationship that she had with her parents growing up.

'I had a very tough childhood. It was lonely,' Garten said during the interview.

The author described her mother, Florence Rosenberg, as 'disconnected' and said that her dad, Charles Rosenberg, was 'always mad' at her.  

'He tried to control me,' Garten told The New York Times about her father.

'What goes in early goes in deep, and I’m always trying to recreate what I craved when I was a kid.'

Garten previously discussed her childhood in her 2024 memoir, Be Ready When The Luck Happens, alleging that her father had been abusive towards her and her brother, Ken.

In an October 2024 interview with Hoda Kotb while promoting the memoir, she described her younger years as 'cold' and 'lonely,' and said she was 'so restricted' as a child by her parents.

When Hoda asked Garten what would happen if she 'scraped her knee' as a child, the author replied: 'No hugs and kisses in my family, it was a very cold, lonely existence,' before she admitted that she's 'not sure' that she even knew if her mother loved her.

'I don't know that she was capable. I was really so restricted as a child. I was always told, whatever I wanted to do wasn't a good idea, so I wasn't myself,' Garten explained, as Hoda touched upon the alleged physical abuse inflicted by her father.

'I think I was terrified that he was going to kill me, and what I realize now is it astonishes me that I didn't have the courage as a child to fight back,' Garten said, before sharing that he once told her: 'No one is ever going to love you.'

'Isn't that stunning? He was mad about something, I have no idea what. He said, "Nobody will ever love you,"' she said.

'Do you know what I love? I love walking up Madison Avenue and someone leans in and says, "I love you." It is this great cosmic joke to me, it's like, "Oops, I guess he was wrong."'

Garten went on to confirm that her father did apologize to her much later in life, as she recalled: 'He just turned to me and said, "I don't know what I was thinking." And I thought, "Wow he's been torturing himself all this time." It meant he said, "I'm sorry." I thought that was an incredibly difficult thing for a father to say.'

However, she never had such a conversation with her mother, Florence, and said she's not even sure that she 'acknowledged' her career.

Ina and Jeffrey married in 1968, and she started her career off by working as the White House budget analyst, while slowly refining her cooking skills.

In 1978, she left her government job and purchased a food store in New York called Barefoot Contessa.

For more than two decades, Ina grew it into a booming business before releasing her first cookbook in 1999.

It was an immense success and launched her into mega stardom within the culinary world.

She began making frequent appearances on Martha Stewart's show before landing her own Food Network program, called Barefoot Contessa, in 2002.

Since then, Ina has released a whopping 13 cookbooks in total and has embarked on a slew of other business endeavors. Her show went on for 29 seasons before coming to an end in 2021.