Survival Foods Grocery List

Storing survival foods provide a sense of security for events that interrupt normal daily living activities such as natural disasters or pandemic illnesses. Survival foods need a long shelf life combined with nutrition provided by protein, carbohydrates and fats. Although the Center for Disease Control recommends keeping a three day food supply, others including author Sharon Astyk writing in "Independence Days -- a Guide to Sustainable Food Storage and Preservation" suggest maintaining a three month supply of survival foods.

Prepared Foods

Your shopping list should include cans or jars containing protein sources such as tuna, salmon, chicken and peanut butter. These items also offer some fats and mix well with stored pasta or rice to complete a meal. Canned vegetables and soups offer carbohydrates and vitamins. Protein bars and textured vegetable protein provide essential amino acids as well as vitamins without taking up a lot of storage space. These prepared foods do not require heating. If your space allows, add some basic spices or prepared sauces to your survival shopping list such as black pepper, ketchup, mustard and lemon juice. Do not forget infant formula, if appropriate, and pet food.

Cooking and Baking

When purchasing survival foods to protect your family for weeks or months, you should include on your shopping list items that you can cook to provide nutritious, filling meals. Dried legumes such as pinto or black beans and dried starch products like white or brown rice and pasta all have a long shelf life. Combined with canned vegetables, survival meals made with these products meet nutritional and hunger needs.

Baking staples for your grocery list should include flour, rolled oats, baking powder, baking soda, salt, canned or powdered milk, yeast, sugar, oil, vinegar and dried fruit.

Other Essentials

Add multipurpose vitamins for adults and children to your survival foods grocery list. Do not forget a manual can opener in case the electricity goes out of service. Get plenty of bottled water. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, recommends one gallon of water per day for each person and pet. Unless you have enough already, add storage containers to your grocery list and mark each container with the purchase date so that you can rotate out the oldest items. For survival longer than a month, add sprouting seeds such as alfalfa, broccoli, lentils or peas.