Why Natalie Portman's Kids Have Been Vegan Since Birth

There is a moment Natalie Portman has described more than once, sitting pregnant with her first child, reading a book about the food system, and suddenly seeing the question differently.

Not just what she ate, but what she would eventually feed the person growing inside her.

That moment rerouted everything, and her children have been eating plant-based ever since.

The Book That Started It All

Portman had been a vegetarian since she was nine years old, long before Hollywood made that kind of thing fashionable. But it was Jonathan Safran Foer’s memoir ‘Eating Animals’ that pushed her fully into veganism around 2011.

She told US Weekly that the book made her genuinely aware of how the factory farming world operates behind closed doors, in ways most people are deliberately shielded from seeing.

What made it hit differently was the timing. She was pregnant when she read it, and she told the LA Times that Foer’s central question, about what to feed his own children, landed hard because she was asking herself the exact same thing.

The values she wanted to pass on and the food she would put on the table became, in her mind, the same conversation.

How the Kids Actually Eat

Portman told US Weekly that raising her children plant-based comes really naturally, mostly because the logic is simple. You make one dinner, and the whole household eats it. Vegan and vegetarian food became the default, the normal, the baseline of what her kids grew up knowing as food.

The daily meals in the Portman household are built around what she herself eats. She described her own routine to Harper’s Bazaar as starting with oatmeal or avocado toast, taking vitamin D daily and B12 shots monthly, and building dinners around pasta, Italian food, or Japanese food. The kids eat the same table, the same plates.

The Husband Factor

Portman’s approach gets more interesting when you factor in that her husband, ballet choreographer Benjamin Millepied, is not vegan.

She has spoken openly about the dinner table conversations this creates, with her son Aleph asking why his father eats certain things that his mother does not. Rather than avoiding the question, Portman answers it directly, walking him through the same reasoning she arrived at as a child, that animals feel things, that they are not so different from the creatures in the cartoons kids grow up watching.

She has been explicit that she does not impose her beliefs and wants her children to ultimately make their own decisions. Her quote to AM New York was straightforward: her kids, she wants them to make their own decisions. The plant-based home is an environment, not a mandate.

What She Replaced, and How

One of the things Portman addresses that most celebrity vegans skip over is the practical reality of what you actually eat instead.

She told US Weekly that over the years she found genuinely great replacements, tempeh bacon, coconut yogurt, cashew-based cheese, and pointed out that these are not compromises but things that are actually delicious in their own right.

The family also grows their own garden at home, tending herbs, chard, artichokes, tomatoes, peppers, avocados, figs, and olives, which grounds the food philosophy in something tangible and seasonal rather than purely ideological.

The Bigger Picture She Is Raising Them In

At the Change NOW conference in 2025, Portman described veganism as basic empathy, something she understood as a child by recognizing animals as creatures similar to herself. She connected it directly to feminism, environmental activism, and labor rights, describing every meal as an opportunity to express a commitment to something larger than appetite.

Her children are not growing up vegan because a nutritionist recommended it. They are growing up vegan because their mother has spent her entire life building a coherent set of values, and the dinner table is simply where those values show up three times a day.