“Everything You Know About Funerals is Wrong“: The Crusade Against Commercial Death-Care

Of the nearly 2.5 million people who will die in the United States this year, 99 percent will travel through a funeral home. That’s a big problem, according to Joshua Slocum of the Funeral Consumers Alliance (FCA), a political lobbying group based in Burlington, Vermont. The $11 billion “death-care“ industry, he says, is taking advantage of bereaved consumers at a time when they are most vulnerable—even going so far as to purposely mislead people into thinking embalming is mandated by law (it isn’t). The F