How Chrissy Teigen (40) Gets Her Kids to Try Every Food on the Table

Chrissy Teigen is a bestselling cookbook author, a person who can talk about food for hours, and the daughter of arguably the most enthusiastic Thai cook in Los Angeles. She has written three Cravings cookbooks, launched a food website, and once described food as her second language.

And her son Miles, at six years old, has never, not once, willingly eaten a vegetable.

The broccoli floret hidden in fried rice does not count, and Miles would like you to know he was very upset about it.

The Most Honest Food Parent in Hollywood

Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live in early 2024, Teigen laid out the situation with her signature bluntness. Luna, her eldest, is a dream eater who tackles salads and vegetables without complaint.

Miles, her second child, has built an entire identity around not eating anything green.

He discovered the broccoli in the fried rice, was deeply upset about it, and that was that. The school explained to Teigen that food refusal is often the one domain where young children feel genuinely in control, so Miles is exercising his power aggressively.

Rather than spiraling into guilt or launching a covert vegetable campaign, Teigen simply accepted the dynamic and talked about it publicly in a way that made every parent of a picky eater feel instantly seen.

Four Different Dinners, Zero Apologies

In a video she posted to Instagram captioned “POV: each kid wants something different for dinner,” Teigen showed herself preparing mac and cheese, chicken tenders covered in red sauce and cheese, broccoli and cheese, and brownies, all at the same time for four different children. The internet had opinions. Teigen did not particularly care.

She followed it up with a message to struggling moms that was more useful than anything a parenting expert has ever said: it does not matter. You can spend three hours making dinner or five minutes making dinner. They hate it either way.

The standard of making food your kids will love is an impossible one, and she is here to tell you to let it go.

What She Actually Puts on the Table

Here is where it gets genuinely interesting, because Teigen does not serve beige food. The family table regularly features dishes from her mother Pepper Thai’s repertoire, bold Thai flavors, fish sauce, chiles, ginger, lime, and complex aromatics that most children would immediately reject.

Luna not only eats these dishes but has favorites. Her top pick from the Cravings 2 cookbook is the Thai Soy-Glazed Fried Ribs. At two years old, she was making elaborate fruit plates with cookie cutters, doing what Teigen called a very Thai thing naturally.

The secret, to the extent there is one, is simply that the food is always there. The family’s approach, including grandmother Pepper Thai living with them and cooking constantly, means the children grow up surrounded by real food made with real ingredients.

Luna absorbed it completely. Miles is still working through his feelings about it.

The Thai Grandmother Factor

Pepper Thai’s cookbook includes a note that Luna and Miles are starting to enjoy spicy food, which is a significant development for any household run by a woman nicknamed after the chiles she snacks on like croutons.

The grandchildren grow up watching Pepper cook, helping form pork meatballs for Jok Moo, the Thai rice porridge that Teigen has eaten since she was a baby and recently introduced to her youngest two.

Luna sat on the kitchen counter helping form the meatballs and drop them into the pot. That is the actual method at work in this household. Not strategies or tricks. Just a grandmother who cooks from memory, a mother who was raised watching her, and kids who grow up in a kitchen that smells like ginger and garlic and always has something on the stove.

Miles will come around eventually. Or he will not. Either way, dinner will be on the table.