Life satisfaction is a psychological state of an individual, however, a psychological perspective on how life
satisfaction is based on cognitive inference-making has been largely neglected in the extant literature on elderly’s
life satisfaction. This paper flls the gap by focusing on the psychological determinants of Chinese elderly’s
satisfaction with the food domain of life, i.e. satisfaction with food-related life. Data were collected by personal
interviews conducted in Beijing with 452 participants above 60 years old from March to May 2018. Based on
means-end theory and the “bottom-up” approach to the concept of life satisfaction, this study confrms the hierarchical relationships between beliefs about food safety, taste, naturalness and freshness, the food-related goals
of health seeking, enjoyment seeking and variety seeking, satisfaction with food-related life, and overall life
satisfaction among Chinese elderly. All the three food-related goals positively affected Chinese elderly’s satisfaction with food-related life with the goal of enjoyment seeking as the strongest predictor. Positive belief about
food freshness was related to the importance of all the three goals. Food naturalness belief was negatively related
to the goals of health seeking and enjoyment seeking, while belief about food safety did not have any signifcant
impact on either of the two goals. The food taste belief did not signifcantly affect the goal of enjoyment seeking
but affected the goal of variety seeking. Implications for how to improve Chinese elderly’s satisfaction with foodrelated life and for future research were provided.