The invention discloses a method for detecting fatty acid in food. The method includes grinding the food, sieving the ground food, filling a centrifuge tube with the sieved ground food, adding normal hexane, conducting heating extraction at 60 DEG C, adding a sodium methylate solution for methyl esterification, adding saturated sodium chloride, standing and taking liquid supernatant so as to obtain an analysis sample; detecting the analysis sample by gas chromatography and gas chromatography-mass spectrography to obtain retention time and a spectrum, and comparing the spectrum with a mass spectrum database to obtain a fatty acid components corresponding to different retention time; quantifying the peak area of corresponding fatty acid in the spectrum in terms of percentage, and computing and determining the percentage of each fatty acid component in the sample to be detected. The method for detecting the fatty acid in the food has the advantages of simplicity, convenience, less consumption of standard samples, simplified detection steps, shorter detection time, simple and feasible detection process, high repeatability and capability of being used for detecting relative content of the fatty acid in raw milk rapidly.