The Usual Disclaimer: This is NOT to minimize medical conditions such as oxalosis or hyperoxaluria, or disparage their treatment and care. It is not medical or menu advice. It is not a knowledgeable book review or criticism of an author or her health journey discovery which has inspired the author and many readers. This is only a monologue by some random person who just spent the past 24 hours fretting because she has no one else to take care of. Here we go.

Library had a book the other day, a lot of books really but this one caught my eye. The cover alerted us that people who ruminate over eating healthy are barking up (or chewing on) the wrong tree. Because the stuff we think is good for us may be full of oxalates that are causing a health crisis of many different symptoms all across America. That sounded like a relaxing bedtime read, so I took it right home.

So sure, I’d read that some plants contain enough oxalates to even be fatal (rhubarb leaves), or to cause agonizing pain to tissues of the entire digestive tract (skunk “cabbage”), or just enough to make me extravagantly sick for an entire morning. (That was a friend’s proud gift of fresh-picked New Zealand spinach from her garden, which tasted wholesome and stayed down for about 15 minutes.) It’s pretty common knowledge that rhubarb stems, chard, spinach, and beet greens are all edible but do have a lot of oxalic acid. The concern there is that oxalic acid can be a factor in conditions such as kidney stones and gout.

But the book added two armaments of data to my talent for worrying. One, its many troubling accounts of oxalate-attributed medical symptoms affecting every part of the human body. Two, the tables and charts naming the oxalate content of the foods I eat every day just in trying to do the right thing.

The word “irony,” I think, refers to the gap between Justice as conceived and executed by God, and the justice that we humans grope for with duct tape and string. The irony here is that it took me years of constant book reading and experimentation to arrive at the whole-food plant-based diet which seems to checkmark all the right boxes. To wit, the largest meal of the day being breakfast…

1. large heap of boiled mustard or dandelion or other greens plus stewed salt-free tomatoes plus healthful toppings — horseradish, ginger, balsamic vinegar, mustard (to increase sulforaphane content of the greens)

2. black bean or other bean soup with garlic and miso and almonds (raw, unsalted, powdered in the blender as a salt substitute) plus Ethiopian Berbere powder, containing 15 or so spices

3. hot water with matcha green tea plus a heaping teaspoon of turmeric and black pepper, with a dash of unsweetened soymilk and a tablespoon of blackstrap molasses.

4. a couple of bites of dark 72% chocolate chips to balance out the taste of everything else.

This is makes for half an hour of munching on penitential flavors trying to do the right thing. (If a nice bowl of Life cereal could have the same effect I’d go for that instead.) This way the whole gamut of adversarial tastes can be over with and done early in the day.

After that breakfast hurdle, the rest of the day is easier. It’s just picking an item or two from a consistent menu of options. That would be sliced raw vegetables like beets or celery or this past week a bag of raw spinach. Or whole grains (barley, rye, oat groats, buckwheat, spelt, emmer faro, pearl millet, brown rice…). Or tofu, or sweet potatoes, or lavash bread, or stewed prunes or other fruit, or berries, or plain air-pop popcorn, and some more dark chocolate and nuts. That’s the story.

Again, not dietary advice. Just an amateur cobbling things together in the ongoing effort to be a little less sad.

Now here’s the justice punchline:

…the book says that a safe maximum daily consumption of oxalates is about 200 mg per day, and that the foods above are, hold on to your hat, sky-high in oxalates.

The prospect of good intentions being so far wrong had my mind racing through a night of sleep, dreaming of imaginary nutrient charts and trying to put together a better plan. Now to be fair, the book has plenty of ideas for a low-oxalate diet of substitutions, including animal products and kale and lettuce.

But for one day the whole health quest seemed so daunting that for lunch I just gave up and had a turkey sandwich from Trader Joe. It was good. Then I came home and read online reviews of the book by two different nephrologists, and looked up posts by Dr. Michael Greger (How Not to Die), who put a broader perspective on the issue.

What is the lesson in all this? The lesson is that compared to other world problems, fretting all about this is a massive privilege. Back to the library with this book. Time for the nightly walk to the store, to refill my water jug at the filtration machine and observe some birds.