Meet Jared Veldheer: Former Arizona Cardinals offensive lineman turned lunch man – Arizona Cardinals Blog

Like many retired NFL players, Jared Veldheer has found a new way to occupy his time.

He has taken up cooking, which means he spends a lot of time in a kitchen. He’s also now into meal prepping and has become pretty good at grocery shopping.

But he’s not a chef, he’s a lunch man at a school.

Veldheer, who was an offensive lineman for five teams including the Arizona Cardinals during an 11-year career through 2020, is in charge of lunch for about 170 preschool students through eighth graders — and more than 200 on Taco Tuesdays — at St. Paul the Apostle School in Grand Rapids, Michigan. For the past four months, five days a week from 7:45 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., Veldheer plans, preps and cooks an eclectic menu that’s far from the typical school lunch fare: beef bulgogi, chicken tikka masala, smoked carnitas and chimichurri flank steak. The cost is $3.50, which has parents asking: “Can we come for lunch?”

“It looks like a restaurant,” St. Paul the Apostle principal Michelle Morrow told ESPN.

Veldheer isn’t shy about his love of food. He developed a creativity for cooking as a child, when, if he didn’t like what his mom cooked, he’d have to make his own sandwiches, which led to him trying new ways to stack bread, meat, cheese and other things.

“I’ve eaten a lot of dishes,” he said. “I like a lot of different types of food.”

Now he’s taking his experiences with food — including eating vast amounts of it as an offensive lineman — and putting it to use preparing the healthiest, most nutritious food he can to help children grow and develop.

“We know a well-fueled body creates the best student,” Morrow said.

How did he become the lunch man?

In early August, a couple of weeks before the school year started, St. Paul the Apostle found itself without someone to run their kitchen.

Veldheer, who as a parent of two children at the school and had…