Man-eating mushroom

This picture is not related to the story.
This is posted to break the wide grey space.

Artist Jae Rhim Lee thinks that we are going about death all wrong. We dress up our deceased in their favorite outfits, embalm them with chemicals  and put them in a coffin before burying them.
The Scientist magazine, from where I adopted this story, says that Lee thinks that this type of burial reflects our desire to live an immortal life. Thus, we try to preserve the body as a symbolic act to prolong the decay.And thus she thought of another idea: try decomposition. 
In keeping with the idea, she has launched her “Infinity Burial Project” to accelerate the decaying process. Lee, who did her graduate work in visual arts program at the Massachusetts Institute of  Technology, is developing a mushroom strain that is trained to digest the tissues of the human body.She   has also designed a prototype of a burial suit that can be seeded with the mushroom’s spores.
The article, written by Jef Akst, said some scientists found the idea interesting and practical. “It’s definitely a concept that would be workable,” Akst quoted microbial econologist Scott Bates of the University of Colorado at Boulder as saying. Bates says there is no doubt that fungi can decay human flesh, citing a example the case of Mark Tatum, a patient from Kentucky who lost a portion of his face to an aggressive Mucormycosis infection in 2000. “Fungi are certainly masters at producing extracellular enzymes that are going to be involved in breaking down (organic) components.”
Starting with edible fungi such as oyster mushrooms, Lee runs a small-scale selective breeding program in her home where she collects her own discarded body tissues – hair, skin, nails, etc – and incorporates them into the culture medium for the mushrooms.The project is still in the early stages and she doesn’t yet have any data to share on how good are the fungi are at breaking down the tissues. But she hopes that by chosing the most effective strains to breed, she will evolve an efficient strain to breed.The burial suit Lee has developed is a cotton body-covering with crocheted netting into which a liquid mixture of mushroom spores an be  embedded.
In addition to helping decompose body more quickly,  Lee expects that the fungi will help break down some of the toxin in the body. She says a national biomonitoring program at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has identified 219 toxic chemicals in the body. “It really points to the fact that our bodies are pretty toxic,” she says.
There are some concerns, however, says Glenys McGrowan of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Queensland in Australia. “Introducing a large volume of a particular species of gungus into a soil environment might have the effect of unbalancing the natural soil biota of that area,” she said in an email to the author. Indeed, the author says such accumulation of naturally occurring fungi already exists in some cemeteries.
How, for example, will the new fungi strain affect the existing soil organism when introduced into a ground in potentially high concentration in a cemetery? Also, there is the question of effectiveness. Are there fungi that can decay human bodies and could those strains be developed? Is it more effective than nature?
Then, there are religious and spiritual issues to consider, McGowan says. Lee says that her fungal method of burial could be just as meaningful as placing flowers on a casket. “The body is this daily reminder that we are mortal,” she was quoted as saying.
Want your body eaten by a mushroom?