The Unusual Way Harrison Ford's Son Became A Professional Chef

Harrison Ford is an iconic movie star who has starred in powerhouse franchises like "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones," but he's not the only famous Ford in the family. Harrison has five children: his son Liam with his current wife and fellow actor Calista Flockhart, Georgia, Malcolm, Willard, and his oldest son, Ben, who's a successful chef and restaurant owner. Ben's path to becoming a chef, however, didn't start in a kitchen — it started on a baseball field.

Millions of people have looked up to and been inspired by Harrison, but he has never wanted his son Ben to have to live up to his legacy as an actor. Whether it was in the kitchen or on the baseball diamond, Harrison always wanted Ben to travel his own path in life.

Ben was a stand-out player at Highland Hall High in Northridge, California, hitting .833 his junior year, which was nearly double the school record at the time. Ben tried to step out of his father's shadow by excelling in a different field. In an 1985 interview with the Los Angeles Times about Ben's then-emerging baseball career, Harrison spoke on this topic. "I certainly hope Benjamin doesn't see me the same way that strangers do," he said. "He shouldn't mythologize what I do for a living... Only time and circumstance will prove whether Benjamin is sufficiently talented to make it in baseball. It won't make a bit of difference who I am." But somewhere along the way, Ben's career path changed direction entirely.

After high school, Ben Ford went on to play college baseball at the University of Southern California. In an interview with "CBS This Morning" in 2015, Ben said, "Baseball is what dominated my life from the time I was 10 to when I was in my early twenties." Ben dedicated much of his time to the game, but he also made room for one of his other passions: cooking. "I always was cooking, I always was doing dinner parties," he added. But an injury in his twenties brought Ben's baseball career to an end, clearing the way for his new career path. 

Ben told CBS, "When I hurt myself, I got a couple of my mom's Jacques Pépin videos, some of her kitchen knives and I literally went to San Francisco and started beating at back doors and did it the old fashioned way." As for how his father, Harrison Ford, took the news, he responded with a more lighthearted approach. Ben told The Boston Herald in 2010, "We were at Mason's Restaurant in San Francisco... I told him and he just said, 'Well, chefs eat everything, so I guess you'll have the sweetbreads.' That was his passive-aggressive answer to me." Ben's career transition has ultimately proven to be a success as he now runs his own restaurant, Ford's Filling Station, in Los Angeles, and published his own cookbook, "Taming the Feast: Ben Ford's Field Guide to Adventurous Cooking," in 2014.