This article examines how world food crises are defined and governed within the Committee on World Food Security, in line with the work on the strategic uses of knowledge and ignorance in global governance. Created to regulate the 1974 crisis, it was reformed to face the 2008 crisis. In 1974, the Committee developed the world food security paradigm promoting productivism and free trade in agriculture. An examination of its archives shows that it institutionalized the diagnosis of Western diplomaties despite the opposition of the G77, which preferred a regulation based on reserve stocks and food aid. In 2008, the Committee opened itself up to non-state actors and drew upon an independent panel of experts, thereby kindling hopes among supporters of food sovereignty and of the right to food that global food regulation would be transformed. Yet the ethnography of the Committee suggests that multi-positioned actors in the field of global food governance continue to defend the paradigm first forged in 1974.