Vegan prepping Covid-19

Vegan Disaster & Pandemic Prepping: Recommended Foods

This page offers a grocery list for vegans who want to intelligently go about prepping for any sort of food supply disruption.

Whatever the potential crisis, it’s worth carefully thinking through which imperishable foods you can acquire to comfortably get you and your family through at least a few weeks. Most foods that are ideal for prepping are cheap, tasty, and nutrient-dense. None of these foods are at all disagreeable to eat in the event of an emergency.

Key Prepping Concepts

For anyone preparing for food supply disruptions, it’s good to know that vegan prepping is remarkably easy. The most convenient, inexpensive, and imperishable pantry items are nearly all vegan.

Conscientiously preparing for a food disruption pays off in a couple ways. First, it ensures you’ll have enough to eat if panic-buying leaves your local supermarket’s shelves bare. Second, by thinking in advance about nutrition and purchasing a variety of foods, you’ll have a more more appealing and diverse stockpile to rely on should an emergency arise.

When COVID-19 pandemic arrived, I decided to buy a couple month’s worth of food for myself so I could stay out of grocery stores. My goal was to purchase as many calories and as much protein as cheaply as possible, using foods that don’t require refrigeration.

Chris Martenson promotes the idea of keeping a “deep pantry.” Instead of buying revolting buckets of pre-made processed food marketed to apocalyptic preppers, you can buy cheap grains, beans, and nuts—all foods that should be key parts of your diet anyway. If the four horsemen of the apocalypse don’t come trotting in, you can gradually consume the foods in your deep pantry—and buy fresh replacements—so none of your purchases go to waste.

If you’ve decided to stock up on food, you’ll find the below list helpful. It’ll ensure you don’t forget anything important and obvious.

Essential Vegan Foods for Emergencies

Here are the items I purchased in early 2020 to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic, which together easily covered my calorie and protein needs for a couple of months:

You can multiply the quantities listed above with the number of people in your household to determine a reasonable amount of food required to prepare for a longer-term emergency.

Most of these products are available in bulk-sized containers from Amazon.com. Please see our vegan grocery for more items suitable for vegan prepping.

For more information about stocking and preparing these sorts of foods, the cookbook to get is The Homemade Vegan Pantry, by Miyoko Schinner. Here’s our list of other top vegan cookbooks.

Finally, in the event that your water supply gets interrupted, make sure your drinking water needs are covered for at least a few weeks. Remember that having adequate access to water is even more important than stocking food. The CDC offers excellent advice on how to create and store an emergency water supply.

For further reading: Please see our vegan food compendium and our vegan cooking guide.
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