Dasia Hood Explores the Dark Side of the Cacao Industry with ‘Eat My Flesh’

When Dasia Hood moved from one Queen City to another, arriving from her hometown of Cincinnati to Charlotte in 2021, she thought of herself as more of a business-minded person.

She had been writing poetry since early childhood, but that was the scope of her creative output. In Charlotte, she found herself volunteering at the Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA) Center, where she offered her help with operations and marketing.

Being around so many creatives working in such a wide range of mediums provided too much inspiration to ignore, however.

“I think that space really encouraged me to see myself as an artist,” she recalled. “That’s where I think I became more confident in the idea of really coming out with my own self-expression.”

Since then, Hood has taken the local creative scene by storm, most notably with Dark & Divine, a transformative series that places Black bodies at the center of art and cultural expression.

Through figure drawing workshops, creative writing sessions, culinary pop-ups and any number of other creative events, the series has aimed to foster a reconnection with the African-American Diaspora’s complex histories and perceptions of the Black body.

The most recent project Hood has launched under the Dark & Divine umbrella is titled Eat My Flesh, a multi-disciplinary project that explores the chocolate industry as a metaphor for the systematic consumption of Black bodies in all aspects of life and love.

“Eat my flesh, this has always been the demand,” Hood wrote in the intro to the series. “From the plantations to the factory lines, Black bodies have been harvested, processed, and consumed, wrapped in gold foil and sold as indulgence. Chocolate, a symbol of luxury and desire, carries within it a history of the extraction of land, of labor, of life itself.”

In 2025, Hood connected local Black-owned business Beyond Amazing Donuts with Divine Chocolate USA, a Fair Trade chocolate company on a mission to end exploitation in the cacao industry, launching a chocolate sour cherry donut created to raise awareness for the dark side of chocolate production.

She also hosted workshops such as “Tasting Her Words,” which paired poetry with a chocolate-tasting session at the Gantt Center that took participants on a sensory experience of Black women creatives, including Solange Knowles, Ntozake Shange and more.

This year, she’s in the preliminary phases of shooting her first TV series, titled Machetes & Melanin, which builds on her research into cacao industry exploitation to tell a tale of dystopian farmers facing their last chance at growing something on Earth.

She has also trademarked Dark & Divine, creating a brand and launching the Dark & Divine Journal, a subscription-based interdisciplinary archive offering exclusive art, poetry and updates on her work.

We sat down with Hood to talk more about Eat My Flesh, Machetes & Melanin, and her experience in Charlotte’s creative scenes.

This interview has been edited for conciseness and clarity.

Queen City Nerve: Were you creative from a young age? Have you always had that itch to find different ways to express yourself?

Dasia Hood: Yeah. I started off with poetry. I’ve always been a poet from a very young age. My mom helped me harness that. So I would say my expression is mostly just different forms of poetry for me, because it’s not always just writing poems for me. In my family, they always call me the more creative one. I was also the more rebellious one, if anything. But it wasn’t really fostered a lot. My family came from more of a business corporate background. So for me, artistry was pretty new in terms of someone in the family being interested in it.

I took my interest in it more from a business standpoint at first because that’s how I was raised. And then when I came to Charlotte, I was awakened to the creative ecosystem more. In Ohio, where I was from, that wasn’t really available or accessible to me. So when I came to Charlotte, that’s when I found art to be more of like, “Oh, this is something I could really do and make a career out of and transform my work with.”

What were some of the first projects that you worked on after immersing yourself in Charlotte’s creative scene?

Dark and Divine was the culmination, the climax of a couple of years of collaborating with different artists. So I would say that started in 2021 when I really started taking action on being a creative, and [doing so] outwardly, not just inwardly. So it started with the figurative art scene, and that’s why Dark & Divine was so centered on figurative art. The first series I did in 2024, that was where I began to bloom with art, and I still do that. And Dark & Divine is still, at the root of the work that I do, the celebration of the body.

Where do you think that theme and that passion comes from?

It’s personal. It’s definitely a personal experience. The Dark & Divine phrase was because I felt like there is a spirituality in my self-expression that had to be amplified … The personal experience part of it came from, at that time when I was figure modeling, I was reconnecting with my body. I was reconnecting to my sensual reality, which was to me very transformative, considering I had a child really young and … I’ve just always been a very sensual person, so I felt like the figurative art space was such a welcoming space to be vulnerable and be sensual.

And I wanted to celebrate and provide a different perspective on it for a lot of the other Black artists that I have been working with and talking to about figurative photography, figurative drawing, sensual expression, sensuality.

And so it all came together. So I was actually really, really honored and taken aback about how responsive the greater community was to the project, considering I was really new to the scene, to be honest.

You bring a certain political awareness to your art. Were you raised with that or is that something that came to you as an adult?

I would say, no, I haven’t always been very politically aware. But I think as I’ve gotten older and taking on that responsibility of being an artist, I understood the importance of aligning my work with things greater than me. And even though I wasn’t politically aware, I do have political values and values that I think other people share.

For me, a big goal for me being an artist isn’t so much about being a creative. It’s like, what impact and legacy can I leave with this time that I have? And there’s two narratives that have been really important to me so far, which is Black love and intimacy, which I attached a lot to the figurative art of Dark & Divine, and the second series, Eat My Flesh, which is what I’m working on now, probably through 2027. And it’s a lot about the Black community’s relationship to land and labor.

Read more: A Call to Black Artists on the Experience of Homelessness and Belonging by Dasia Hood (2025)

So I’m hoping that I can bring my work closer to international conversations and narratives, and hopefully that leaves an impact and makes a change. But I’m really happy if people will just make a connection and maybe take an interest because it’s presented to them in a new way versus the way we always see it presented to us.

It’s presented in a way that is really deeply connected to a Black woman’s experience and her daily values and her daily experience and love. In Charlotte, we’re not out on the farm every day. Our ecosystem is city-based, and that’s just me being authentic to what I know. I’m not going to pretend I live on a farm or live in Africa. But I do know that I have an experience that can be used to have conversations about land and legacy.

There are so many layers to the angle or idea of exploring the exploitation around chocolate that goes into this series. It can metaphorically be connected to Blackness in that poetic way, but then also you’re talking about a very literal social issue happening across the globe in different places. How did you decide this issue is one that I want to explore further artistically?

When I first came up with Eat My Flesh, my goal was to create a chocolate series and connect Dark & Divine to the culinary arts and do some figurative chocolate expression, which was too narrow for me at the time. As I did more research and talked to more people about the project, I was exposed to the deeper and darker side of the chocolate industry, and it got me thinking about the conversations we’re having right now globally about consumption.

I did recognize instantly that metaphor of chocolate skin. And when you think about the beauty and the end product of the Black experience and how our joy and artistic expression is the end product of something that can be traced to the root and the soil, it can be sad, and has come from people actually having terrible labor experiences and unethical practices. And in my opinion, Eat My Flesh is basically saying, “Hey, Black people are aware that we are being consumed metaphorically and literally.” And that consumption to me relates a lot to how capitalism and patriarchal systems are consuming the Earth.

So there’s a huge relationship there that I wanted to explore artistically and bring some awareness to, because I think we, as people in any community, indulge in delectable things like chocolate on the regular but we don’t stop to think about how we got these things. And we’ll continue to consume, consume, consume because we’re being advertised to and because the artist who presented to us is telling us to do that. But in reality, it actually comes at the cost of people’s safety and livelihood.

When I learned about how the chocolate industry actually has a lot of enslavement practices, I knew that I couldn’t do a chocolate series without making that a huge part of the narrative that I was telling. So I had to take ownership there and take a voice, and I’m happy to do that because I love chocolate, and I know that it changed me in terms of how I go about selecting products and being a consumer. And so that’s what I want; I want this to be a body of work that different people who want to amplify this message of unethical practices in some of the things that we indulge in on a daily basis.

Tell me a little bit about Machetes & Melanin. Is this your first filmmaking process?

Yes. I’m so excited about that. So, in this series, the first phase of it, phase zero, is collaborating with the community. I did a collaboration with Beyond Amazing Donuts and connected them to an international brand called Divine Chocolate, and got some donated chocolate to the business. And then I did a little chocolate tasting with the Gantt Center to just collect data on people’s interest in this topic. And then I went forward to starting to make some visuals, and I did an editorial shoot. I’ve done a couple of those.

And so the TV series is my first film product, and it was actually supposed to be an event at first. I wanted to do a cosplay event over on this farm where people would come dressed up Mad Max style and I would have a conversation with them about cacao and do a cacao ceremony and educate them. But it ended up transforming into a TV show because the story was so much longer than that, and we had an opportunity to tell it.

Read more: Wild Recluse Spreads Message of Self-Love and Exploration Through Multiple Mediums (2025)

So Machetes & Melanin is basically a sci-fi drama. It’s going to be a TV series, and we’re going to work with B Sinima Studios and other local creatives and actors, some of whom have already participated in Dark & Divine photography, some other models like Jason Dawkins, who’s a huge collaborator of mine. And what we’re doing is we’re going to create this six- or seven-part series, and it’s a story about what choices we would make with the last living soil on Earth.

So in this world, there is no fertile land. There’s people who are trying to basically take up and take ownership of the last remaining resources. And the character I play is Maeve, and she’s this sexy, savvy scavenger with a background in history connected to agriculture, and she ends up stumbling across this abandoned patch of living soil that used to be a government facility that the living soil still has like crops and stuff on it. So it’s very rare to find.

And in this time, during this narrative, she ends up doing a few things; she reconnects with her femininity and then she also ends up having to make choices about, “Am I going to allow other people on this sanctuary?” And then also, “How am I going to keep this from being used in the way that we have destroyed the Earth before?”

You host a lot of poetry workshops at the Gantt Center for people who sign up for tours there. I assume when it’s someone just touring a museum, there must be a lot of amateur folks who maybe have never explored poetry in their lives. What does it mean to you to get to step into their lives for that day and work with them on poetry? 

Poetry is always so personal, so I’m never surprised to hear how many people actually write poetry, but they don’t share it or really talk about it. So being able to teach these workshops allows me to encourage people to share and be vulnerable with people in a way that they haven’t before, and also illuminating to them that they’re more of a poet than they realize. 

So the workshops are presented where I guide them through the process of writing a poem, from thinking of different topics to the abstract nature of those words and what they can mean and how to relate to them and how to describe them, and then also educating them on the forms of poetry. So Shakespearean rhythms or the amount of syllables or structure, giving them that education so that they have some baseline to work with.

My hope is that when they come with me, they feel more comfortable writing and sharing poetry after that moment, where as before, some people will really say, “Oh, I haven’t written poems in forever,” or, “I don’t know how to write,” or, “I write all the time and I don’t share.” And I have videos of people just getting up and being happy to share and saying things that are left unsaid and saying them for the first time in a beautiful way in front of their peers, which is what I want. I want people to have that level of communal intimacy. 

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the Black creative community in Charlotte, and whether it’s too siloed, whether it’s too cliquey, and all those different buzzwords. I don’t expect you to speak for everyone, but how have you seen that play out in your time here, as someone who basically discovered herself as an artist here? 

Well, I really can’t speak for the whole community because I know there’s a native aspect to it, and then there’s also the fact that it’s growing and I think it deserves that opportunity. Here’s what I will say for any art community that I would want to be a part of, or any area of growth: As an artist or as a creative, if you’re going to come into a community, yes, ideally, community means that everybody loves everybody, right? But the real thing is that iron sharpens iron and there’s going to be competition. So if the Black Charlotte creative community expands and grows, it is going to have communities that not everyone is going to be a part of. 

Now, I will say for me, I don’t have a problem with it. I’m going to do me regardless. And I believe that what I’m doing is quality and important and beautiful enough to where other people will get onboard. And I think that if you feel like Charlotte is cliquey, and I’m not saying it’s not, if you feel like the Black creative community is cliquey, I think that you have to understand Black culture is very protective of itself. 

So one part about the Black experience is just knowing that Black people at the end of the day are going to show up for Black people. We love each other, but also we’re still learning how to be in community with each other at this scale with all these opportunities. So, there’s a lot of just feelings and all that involved, but people have conversations about it and you have your own experiences. But I think that if you’re willing to show up and do your best for them, for the most part, people will respect what your work is. Even if they’re not participating with it, they’re going to show you respect. So that’s all I ask for, point blank, period.