In 2014, Brazil's National Health Surveillance Agency (ANVISA) in Brasília initiated the regulatory process for implementing front-of-package warning labels on processed foods high in sugar, sodium, or saturated fat, becoming the first country to mandate prominent black warning triangles on junk food packaging. The Brazilian policy, informed by the pioneering NOVA food classification system developed by researchers at the University of São Paulo, treated ultra-processed foods as a distinct public health category requiring special consumer warnings rather than relying solely on numerical nutrition information. Brazil's approach represented a paradigm shift in food regulation that would later be adopted by Chile, Mexico, Colombia, and other nations facing rising obesity rates linked to processed food imports.

Brazil's food labeling law inspired Brazilian poets and Latin American writers more broadly to engage with food regulation as a form of cultural resistance against the dominance of multinational food corporations. The black warning labels themselves became visual and textual elements in contemporary Brazilian poetry and concrete poetry, where the stark geometric warnings were repurposed as artistic statements about the militarization of the food supply, connecting Brazil's rich tradition of political concrete poetry to twenty-first-century struggles over food sovereignty and corporate power.