Abstract: As an indispensable part of people’s daily diet, edible oil can generate heat energy for the human body and is also an important source of fat soluble vitamins, essential fatty acids, phospholipids, and so on. Because of their different kinds, purity, nutritional components and other indicators, there are great differences in prices, which leads to some lawbreakers mix low value-added edible oil into high value-added vegetable oil in order to get excessive profits. Even worse, some lawbreakers mixes inferior or toxic oils into edible vegetable oil, which brings to food safety problems. Hence, in this paper, the identification and adulteration detection technologies of edible oil at home and abroad in recent years are reviewed. The applications of chromatography (gas chromatography, liquid chromatography), spectroscopy (infrared spectroscopy, fluorescence spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, UV-Vis absorption spectroscopy, terahertz spectroscopy, low field nuclear magnetic resonance), stable isotope technology and other methods (such as electronic nose and electronic tongue) in edible oil are also introduced. At last, the future development direction of edible oil detection is prospected in order to provide theoretical reference for oil detection and food safety in China.