April 22, 2025
Dr. Shadi Atallah is an associate professor of agricultural and consumer economics and an associate director of the Center for the Economics of Sustainability. His research informs recommendations to growers, landowners, and resource managers to manage their crops and natural resources in a way that balances economic and ecological objectives and constraints. His research interests include natural resource economics, bioeconomics, ecosystem services, and sustainable agriculture and food systems.
In this interview, Atallah shares his experience as a CSBS Small Grant recipient for his research project, Consumer demand for labor attributes in food products: the case of prison labor in milk.
Tell us briefly about your research project.
We conducted a nationally representative consumer survey to analyze whether milk consumers are willing to pay a premium to know that the labor involved in milk production is guaranteed minimum wage (FSLA), safe working conditions (OSHA), and certified to be free of prison labor vs. made with prison labor.
How did the initial CSBS Small Grant funding aid in your external funding efforts?
This small grant led me to include additional work related to the social sustainability attributes of food in a later larger grant.
Did you use novel methods or techniques that generally come from other fields?
No, but the literature that we reviewed for this work went beyond consumer economics and included work in the humanities related to carcerality (i.e., the ways incarceration affects people, systems, and society) in general and carcerality in the agricultural and food system in particular, which is an understudied topic.
Did you find that your results applied to or were very relevant to other areas of social and behavioral science?
Absolutely. While consumers were united in their demand for wage and safety standard labels, they were split on their attitudes towards prison labor; some were supportive, seeing it as valuable for skills development and others were opposed to it given the impossibility of consent in a carceral context, and associating the practice with modern slavery. These results should be of interest to social scientists studying food systems and labor practices and behavioral scientists studying consumer demand for sustainability standards.
Did your results get shared and what was that impact like?
My graduate student Donni Stewart presented the pilot results at a small workshop focused on equity in the food system and the survey results at the national agricultural economics conference. Almost no one was aware of prison labor in the food system, and attendees were surprised to learn about how consumers think about it. Some attendees were surprised to see that consumers are willing to pay for labor practice guarantees, such as safety, more than they are for the organic label and found the result important.