The Judas Ear

The first time I tried on the Mushroom Death Suit, my head got stuck halfway through the black funeral shroud. I hadn’t undone enough buttons at the neck. The eco-friendly burial outfit, made of biodegradable cotton, comes in two pieces: a black hoodie with attached mittens and a pair of footed pajama bottoms. Patterns of white stitches branch, like a cell’s dendrites, along the shoulders and hems. With its black fabric and ivory embroidery, the ensemble could be a cross between a gothic straight jacket and Bob Dylan’s Western-style Manuel Cuevas suit from the late nineties—the black one with white piping that the musician wore at his performance for the pope. On my own shroud, a face-flap folds down from the hood and wooden buttons run down the arms, legs, and chest, for the easy dressing of a rigor mortised corpse. Head still stuck inside the suit, I thrashed my arms. “Get it off me!” I gasped to my husband, David.

Because I’m a mycophile—mushroom lover—drawn to the macabre, I’d been excited about an emerging mycotechnology designed by Jae Rhim Lee, founder of the green burial company Coeio. A friend, recalling that I teach a college class on the grotesque, had recommended Lee’s TED Talk: “Saw this and thought of you.” Throughout the talk, Lee struts across the stage while modeling her eco-gothic funeral suit embedded with a mix of microorganisms and mushroom mycelia—those fungal networks of threadlike cells that give rise to the fruiting bodies of mushrooms. The goals of Lee’s mushroom suit, summarized on Coeio’s website, are threefold: to “aid in decomposition, work to neutralize toxins found in the body and transfer nutrients to plant life.” Although mushrooms resemble plants, they don’t photosynthesize. Fungi comprise their own scientific kingdom. Like animals, mushrooms digest their food, though they do this externally, by excreting acids and enzymes into their immediate surroundings and absorbing nutrients through cell chains. Fungi help logs rot into rich layers of compost, building the depth and quality of the soil and stopping dead matter from clogging our environment. Without mushrooms, fallen trees would pile up to the sky.

“[F]ungi are the grand recyclers of our planet,” writes mycologist Paul Stamets in Mycelium Running, “the mycomagicians disassembling large organic molecules into simpler forms, which in turn nourish other members of the ecological community.” Certain fungi, known as saprophytes (from the Greek sapro: “rotten” and phytes: “plants”), feed upon decaying or dead organic matter. These industrious mushrooms—portobello, cremini, oyster, reishi, enoki, royal trumpets, shiitake, white button—speed up decomposition, restore and aerate soil, and provide food for other life forms, from bacteria to bears. “The yeasts and molds used in making beer, wine,...