Ethylene oxide is often used as a food bactericide and is easy to cause residues in food. At present, there is no relevant standard for the determination of ethylene oxide content in food in China. To solve the problem of determining ethylene oxide residues in imported and exported foods, a method for the determination of ethylene oxide residues in different kinds of food was established by headspace gas chromatography. The extraction conditions and parameters of ethylene oxide were optimized by orthogonal design, and it has found that the ultrasonic extraction method with dimethylacetamide was the best. The extraction temperature had the most significant effect on the recovery of ethylene oxide, followed by ultrasonic power and time. The optimum extraction conditions were 40 ℃ of the temperature, the 200 W of the ultrasonic power and 30 min of the time. Under this condition, the recovery was the highest up to 89.25%. Using HP-PLOT\Q Column, the separation effect of ethylene oxide was the best when the flow rate of carrier gas was 2 mL/min. Under the determination conditions of this method, the linearity of ethylene oxide was good in the concentration range of 0.01~1.0 mg/L, and the correlation coefficient was 0.999. The relative standard deviation was lower than 2.96 and the overall recovery was between 76.9% and 91.6%. All these results suggested that, this method has met the requirements for the detection of ethylene oxide content in food. This method is the first time used to determin the ethylene oxide in food by headspace gas chromatography. The experimental process is si mple and can quickly detect and quantify ethylene oxide in food.