SJ Zanolini is a PhD candidate in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, with prior graduate degrees in Chinese Literature and Traditional East Asian Medicine. Their dissertation focuses on medicinal discourse about cheap and widely available foods such as porridge, sweet potatoes, and seaweed in early modern China, first as a means of describing everyday medical practices at the household level, and second to elaborate how intellectual theorizations of the physiology of taste fed competing understandings of chronic ailment, health, and longevity. An avid reader and writer, SJ is also working on a creative non-fiction book on migraines.