On September 19-20, 2011, the United Nations held its first-ever High-Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) at the UN headquarters in New York City, bringing together heads of state to address the global epidemic of diseases including heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and respiratory illnesses that are largely driven by processed food consumption, tobacco, and alcohol. The meeting produced a Political Declaration committing member states to reduce preventable NCD deaths, explicitly recognizing the role of unhealthy diet in the global disease burden for the first time in a UN political declaration. This summit elevated junk food-related illness to the level of a global security and development concern, comparable to infectious diseases in previous UN health declarations.

The UN's recognition of diet-related disease as a global crisis entered the work of poets from the Global South who had long written about the health consequences of imported junk food in their communities, validating a subject that some literary gatekeepers had previously dismissed as insufficiently poetic. Poets from Pacific Island nations, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa have used the UN declaration as a reference point in poems that demand the same international attention for diet-related suffering that has traditionally been reserved for infectious disease, expanding the scope of what health poetry can address.