Mushroom suits and the good death
It's hard to improve on nature
Simple climate action // I S S U E # 4 4 // FUNERALS
The death industry has come up with all sorts of expensive ways to die. One of the most inventive (and at $1,500 a relative bargain) is the mushroom death suit. In theory, as author Eric Bruist explains, it cleanses your corpse and rids the body of toxins as it returns to the Earth.
But the truth is our preoccupations with purity (decomposition) or immortality (artificial preservation) get in the way of something nature has already perfected quite well. This week’s installment of Hothouse explores what it means to have a good funeral for you, and the climate.
Let us know your plans in the poll below.
Mike Coren
If you had to choose a funeral today, how would you bid farewell? 🌱 💀 ⚰️
The fungi-onesie standing between us and a greener death
By Erica Buist
I’m never sure what to say when someone tells me that after they die, they want their ashes to nourish a tree. Particularly if I don’t know them, and we’re in the supermarket. It’s just awkward. Some even go so far as to say they will, by that method, become a tree.
We all recognize the desire to gain symbolic immortality, particularly if you weren’t raised in a religion that promised you an afterlife. I don’t enjoy being the party pooper who barges in wielding a buzzkill of facts, but barge I must: cremains make lousy fertilizer. Ashes do contain certain life-supporting chemicals such as potassium, phosphorus and calcium. But plants also need nitrogen (which calcium can diminish), as well as manganese and carbon, which you won’t find in cremains. The high level of salt in ashes might actually be toxic to many species of plant. You can mix in a sprinkling of ashes small enough to not harm a plant, but that’s hardly as appealing as the idea of nourishing one. Nevertheless, the myth persists.
In 2011, millions were swept up in the hype over artist Jae Rhim Lee’s mushroom death suit, which claimed to be able to filter out “environmental toxins in our bodies.” I have no idea how people can simultaneously believe that human ashes are a biological bounty while a cadaver is a filthy tox-bomb. What we have here is the age-old battle between romance (“I want to be a tree when I die, and gain immortality through perennial life!”) and stone-cold pragmatism (“our bodies are full of toxins and are therefore a burden on the environment”). This is an occasion in which both miss the mark.
This month marks the 10-year anniversary of the moment artist Jae Rhim Lee got on the TED stage in a hooded onesie weaved with mushroom spores, and said, “the Centers for Disease Control in the US says we have 219 toxic pollutants in our bodies, and this includes preservatives, pesticides, and heavy metals like lead and mercury… We are both responsible for and the victims of our own pollution.” She went on to share her solution: “The Infinity Burial Project, an alternative burial system that uses mushrooms to decompose and clean toxins in bodies.” She fed mushrooms hair, skin and nails and chose the best eaters to create a new hybrid mushroom that would decompose bodies at an increased rate, as well as “clean the toxins and deliver nutrients to plant roots, leaving clean compost.” She incorporated this into the aforementioned onesie, a burial suit infused with mushroom spores, coming to a dead body near you. In fact, Luke Perry (who died in 2019), the star of the TV show 90210, was buried in the mushroom suit, and his daughter called it “genius” in an Instagram post.
“Well, this burial suit sounds great!” I assume you’re all yelling. I’m glad you’re so into the idea of a green, environment-nourishing burial. Read on for four reasons why we can now be pretty certain we won’t achieve it in a fungi-onesie.
It’s not necessary. Like, at all.
It was absolutely a noble goal of Lee’s to take “a step towards taking responsibility for my own burden on the planet,” but it’s a misstep. Unless you’re eating it or dumping it in the water supply, a dead body is not a health hazard. Not to people, or to the environment. Sure, it’s not the most attractive of sights – if you’re landscaping your garden I’d definitely go with a water feature or a pergola – but our burden on the planet is in our actions when we’re alive, not the presence of our remains when we’re dead. Perhaps it’s the combination of the general fear of death combined with concern for the planet that’s led to the unexamined assumption that a dead body is a harmful thing?
Mortician Michelle Acciavatti believes the perception of dead bodies being environmental hazards comes, rather randomly, from our knowledge that medications people take end up in the water supply. This happens because we use water to carry away our toilet waste. Unfortunately, water isn’t very good at decomposition, ie. breaking down substances back into their organic components. Michelle believes the train of thought people follow is, ‘If the meds we take appear in the water supply, what happens when we bury a body underground – it must be terrible, right? We must create something that filters all these terrible things out of our bodies!’
“But that is exactly what soil does!” Michelle says. “Soil is incredible. Anything organic in our bodies – formaldehyde, antidepressants, birth control pills, chemotherapy drugs – all of these are organic substances and can be rendered back down into their organic components and recycled back into the environment. In healthy soil, the trace elements of decomposition – anything that can’t be broken down – literally travel millimeters away from the body. They don’t go far.”
The truth is the earth has no problem decomposing us, unless we mess with the process, perhaps, by a well-meaning introduction of a plant species that wasn’t meant to be there. Which brings me to…
The mushroom suit is potentially harmful to the environment
I’ll level with you: I studied Philosophy, so I sat agog as Michelle told me about the role the mycelial network (the fungal network that connects the root systems of living organisms) plays in the environment. That if one tree is sick and in need of nutrients, more nutrients will be shuttled off to it from healthier trees. That plants can put out distress calls if they’re being invaded and get things that can help them repel insects or repair damage. Another thing I didn’t know (which is a very long list) is that one role of the mycelial network is to regulate the rate at which nutrients are distributed in order to not overload trees. Meaning that if Lee’s claim that the mushroom suit speeds up decomposition is true, it is very much Not A Good Thing. As pointed out in this piece on AlterNet, there is no evidence that wearing the mushroom suit makes a body decompose faster, and it’s not even clear why that would be an advantage. Decomposition releases nutrients into the soil; if this process happens faster than the surrounding plants are used to, wouldn’t that cause an issue? Can nutrients be released too quickly?
“A body going into the soil is a boatload of carbon,” says Michelle, “which is great but needs to be regulated at a rate at which the microenvironment can utilize the carbon. We want the mycelial network to be regulating the speed of decomposition.”
It’s also important to note that the mycelial network is highly site-specific – types of fungus that make up the mycelial network can shift within a matter of feet. So the mushroom suit, which is very much “one-size-fits-all” could introduce an invasive species of fungus that doesn’t have a cooperative relationship with the trees in that area. Worst-case scenario, it could disrupt the mycelial network entirely and lead to a decline in overgrowth.
It doesn’t work
Yes, it’s a brilliant concept, but it simply does not work. Mortician Melissa Unfred, who also goes by the moniker The Modern Mortician, said on The W Files podcast, “From my experience with it, you’re going to get just as much action out of a cotton sheet in your grandmother’s closet as you would out of this mushroom burial shroud.” And her experience is pretty well-informed: she explains in the podcast interview that in December 2016, a body was buried in the mushroom suit in a natural burial park outside Austin, with a PVC pipe in the ground next to it so they could run a camera into the grave to watch what happened, and take soil samples to prove the mushroom suit did what Lee claimed it would.
But it didn’t. Nothing changed.
“As much as I genuinely wish all of her claims were true,” said Unfred, “it doesn’t actually do what it claims to do.” Lee simply jumped the gun by promoting this concept before testing whether it worked.
Have you seen the price?!
The mushroom suit isn’t cheap. It costs $1500, which is quite an investment for anything that is, at best, useless. And it doesn’t feel good to be “taking down” the work of someone who is clearly creative, innovative, and well-intentioned. But the very last thing the green funeral industry needs at this delicate moment in time is to fall into the same trap of manipulating grieving families into spending significant sums of money on unnecessary products.
This was the exact accusation leveled against the funeral industry in Jessica Mitford’s ground-breaking exposé, The American Way of Death, which greatly damaged the public’s trust in the industry (and, under those circumstances, rightly so). The very point of the green burial industry is to strip away the unnecessary, and it can’t afford to lose the trust of consumers when what is at stake is so much larger than profits – namely, a change of culture that could improve the health of the planet.
I realize I am, oddly, the bearer of bad news when I say that this process is perfect as it is. Because maybe we want our bodies to be a burden on the earth; it’s a twisted legacy, but anything to leave a mark, right?
Those who choose green burial presumably do so because they want to leave the lightest possible touch on the environment. So who is the mushroom burial suit for? Those who believe their bodies are a burden on the earth – which they aren’t – or those who want to improve the environment around them, to nourish it with the mushroom spores enveloping them – which they can’t.
What should those people go for instead?
The green burial is concerned with stripping away the trappings, the unnecessary or harmful frills we’ve added to our death rituals. The rare hardwoods chopped down for the coffins, the toxic fumes belched from crematorium chimneys, the formaldehyde we imagine will preserve us underground forever like Sleeping Beauty.
Natural burial advocates stripping that all away, in large part because nature doesn’t need our help. Let’s not patronize it. The truth of the matter is almost annoyingly simple: that the best way humans can improve the health of the planet when it comes to death is to just get out of the way.
Next time: Nothing like having dead bodies popping out of the ground to make you develop the greenest form of cremation in the world, am I right?
I'm new-ish to substack and have just seen this. As a death coach I still get asked about this mushroom suit... THANK YOU! I love your writing and your take on a good death, and will mention you in my workshop Beyond Burial.