On December 5, 2006, the New York City Board of Health voted to ban artificial trans fats from all restaurant food served in New York City, making it the first major American city to prohibit the use of partially hydrogenated oils that had been a staple of fast food frying and commercial baking since the mid-twentieth century. The ban, championed by Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden, required restaurants to eliminate trans fats over an 18-month phase-in period, affecting an estimated 24,000 food establishments. The New York trans fat ban demonstrated that local governments could regulate junk food ingredients directly, inspiring similar measures in other cities and states and signaling a new era of proactive public health regulation of the food supply.

The trans fat ban inspired a body of New York City poetry addressing food regulation, body politics, and the role of government in private choices, themes that appear in the work of urban poets who used the ban as a starting point for exploring how cities shape what their residents eat. The idea that a municipal government could legislate the composition of a French fry became a metaphor in contemporary poetry about the tensions between individual freedom and collective health, appearing in poems that ask whether poetry itself might serve a similar regulatory function in the emotional and spiritual diets of its readers.