How Angelina Jolie (51) Is Raising Kids Who Love Real Food

Most parents spend their evenings negotiating with a six-year-old who refuses to touch anything green. Angelina Jolie spent hers teaching her twins how to pull the fangs out of a tarantula before frying it in a pan, and her children asked for seconds.

The way food moves through her family tells you something important about how she parents, and it has nothing to do with rules or restriction.

Food as a Way Into Each Other’s Worlds

Jolie’s six children come from four different countries: Cambodia, Ethiopia, Vietnam, and the United States, and she has always been deliberate about treating that as a gift rather than a complication.

She has said the children are learning about each other’s cultures as well as taking pride in their own, visiting each other’s home countries in turn and discovering what people eat there as a matter of course.

Food, in the Jolie household, is one of the most natural ways that happens. It does not arrive on a plate as a lesson. It arrives as something they do together when they land somewhere new.

The Cricket Story That Says Everything

The most famous window into her food philosophy came during a trip to Cambodia, where her eldest son Maddox was born.

She introduced the boys to crickets as a way of connecting them to the cultural eating traditions of their country, a food that has been part of Cambodian life for generations.

The response was not reluctant nibbling. Maddox and Pax devoured them with such enthusiasm that Jolie told the Louis Vuitton Core Values campaign she eventually had to ban cricket eating entirely because she was afraid they would make themselves sick from eating too many.

Cooking as a Family Ritual

When Jolie filmed ‘First They Killed My Father’ in Cambodia, she brought all six children with her, and the food experience extended well beyond snacking.

She showed her twins Knox and Vivienne how to prepare tarantulas in a skillet, walking them through each step, which was not so different from any parent teaching a child to crack an egg or peel a vegetable.

The hands-on approach is consistent. During lockdown, sources described the family cooking together as a regular anchor of their daily routine, with the children gathered around the kitchen as a way of keeping structure and connection in an unusual situation.

The Philosophy Behind It All

What makes Jolie’s approach to food feel distinctive is not what is on the menu. It is the absence of anxiety around it.

She and Brad Pitt shared a philosophy of allowing children to follow their curiosity about food rather than managing or restricting it, treating meals as part of ordinary life rather than something to be controlled.

Her children have grown up understanding that food looks completely different depending on where you are in the world, that what one culture considers a delicacy another has never heard of, and that being willing to try something unfamiliar is a form of respect as much as it is adventure.

What Other Parents Can Take From It

The tarantula is optional. The idea behind it is not. Jolie’s instinct has always been to use food as a doorway, into other cultures, into conversation, into shared experience around a table or a pan on a stove somewhere far from home.

Her children are as comfortable eating in a tent in Kenya as in a restaurant in New York, and that ease did not come from a curated meal plan. It came from a mother who decided that curiosity about food was worth encouraging, even when it meant the crickets had to be rationed.