Humans are buried in a conventional way – either buried or cremated – as driven by their religious practices, but rapid modernization is now going to transform the burial process to an unimaginable degree.
South Korean woman Jae Rhim Lee has developed a suit, which she titled ‘Mushroom Death Suit/Infinity Burial Suit’ embedded with mushroom spores that speeds up decomposition and neutralizes toxins in the human body after death.
The discovery is termed as eco-friendly because it slowly digests you, while neutralizing any environmental contaminants you harbour – such as pesticides, heavy metals, or preservatives – in the process.
“I was inspired by the idea that mushrooms are the master decomposers of Earth and thereby the interface organisms between life and death,” artist and co-creator of the suit, Jae Rhim Lee said in a recent interview.
The suit was estimated to retail at around US$999.
The lady makes her point here that “We have to cut down trees to make our caskets, which are then coated in chemicals so they’ll last for centuries, taking up a whole lot of valuable land in the process. And before we even make it into that casket, our bodies are pumped full of toxic formaldehyde.”
Mushroom Death Suit was first introduced five years ago, but the public was not ready for the invention at the time, its inventor claims.
‘I realized that a certain amount of the cultural shift needed to precede the commercialization of the suit, and that no matter how we marketed the suit, that the culture was not ready for it,’ Lee said in an interview, explaining why it has taken around half a decade to begin the suit’s beta testing.