Within contemporary social thought, the slow food movement is commonly construed as a growing, organized protest against the development of high-speed lifestyles. The primary aim of this article is to query the limits of such an interpretation. To highlight aspects of the slow food movement that may not be as incongruous to a high-speed society as commonly thought, I explore how the slow food movement relates to the phenomenon of time shortage. I undertake a discourse analysis of slow food texts in the English language to reveal that the aims and activities of the slow food movement may not wholly address the three sources of feeling ‘hurried’, as set out by Southerton and Tomlinson. I find that a more sophisticated analysis of the slow food movement emerges if we avoid thinking of fast and slow in dichotomous terms.