On November 8, 1990, President George H. W. Bush signed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA) into law in Washington, D.C., requiring virtually all packaged foods sold in the United States to carry standardized nutrition labels listing serving size, calories, fat, sodium, and other nutritional information. The law also established definitions for terms like "low fat" and "healthy" and required health claims on food labels to be supported by scientific evidence. The NLEA represented the first comprehensive federal effort to provide consumers with the information needed to make informed choices about junk food and other processed products, fundamentally changing how Americans interacted with packaged food and creating the familiar black-and-white Nutrition Facts panel still in use today.

The Nutrition Facts label became an unexpected poetic text that contemporary poets have incorporated into found poetry and visual poetry, treating the standardized format as a kind of industrial-age haiku that reduces the complexity of food to numerical data. The act of reading nutrition labels entered confessional and narrative poetry as a ritual of modern self-surveillance, appearing in poems by writers like Ada Limón who use the label's clinical language to explore the anxious relationship between knowledge, choice, and bodily health that defines contemporary eating.