Gary Allen has written The Resource Guide for Food Writers (1999); The Herbalist in the Kitchen (2007); Herbs: A Global History (2012); Sausage: A Global History (2015); Can It!: Perils and Pleasures of Preserving Food (2016) and Sauces Reconsidered: Après Escoffier (2019). He self-published over a dozen other books, including: Terms of Vegery (with Karen Philipp, 2012), and How to Serve Man: On Cannibalism, Sex, Sacrifice, & the Nature of Eating (2012).

He edited Remarkable Service (2001) for The Culinary Institute of America; contributed articles to Scribner’s Encyclopedia of Food and Culture (2003) Culinary Biographies (2006), Entertaining from Ancient Rome to the Super Bowl: An Encyclopedia (2008), They Eat That? A Cultural Encyclopedia of Weird and Exotic Food from around the World (2012), Savoring Gotham (2015), The Oxford Companion to Sweets (2015), and The Oxford Companion to Cheese (2016). Allen was associate editor/contributor: The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America(2004) and The Concise Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America (2007); and co-edited, with historian Ken Albala, The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Food and Drink Industries (2007) and Human Cuisine (2008).

He wrote and/or edited course materials for The Culinary Institute of America (1987-2001), and was (at various times between 2000-2006) Vice President, Newsletter Editor, and Webmaster of The Association for the Study of Food and Society. He has been a contributor and Food History Editor at LeitesCulinaria.com (the first website to win a James Beard Award, then won it again the next year). In his spare time, he’s an adjunct professor at Empire State College, maintains a blog and website at onthetable.us, and publishes a monthly newsletter of electronic resources for food writers.