"I've been called up because my country needs me. I like that."

For despite appearances to the contrary, Shirley Spear is no ordinary woman - as readers of The Herald may remember when she was a regular contributor to its Saturday Magazine's food pages in 2001. She's a former journalist and high-flying PR executive turned self-taught cook who founded Three Chimneys restaurant in Skye, once rated among the 50 best in the world for its pioneering use of local produce, and now with a Michelin star. She is also an active campaigner for the reinstatement of Skye airport at Ashaig, near Broadford. And she has just been appointed chair of the Scottish Government's new Scottish Food Commission.

Its remit is to help take Scotland to the next stage of becoming a good food, rather than bad food, nation. Its focus is to be ordinary Scots, rather than producers and exports, with the hope that by 2025 people from every walk of life will take pride and pleasure in local food - as they did in centuries past, long before the advent of fast-food, ready meals and supermarkets.

"We've been called by the Government to work for the good of the country, and I like that," she says. Like Your Country Needs You? "Yes. I feel I'm being given the opportunity to give something back."

In collaboration with vice-chair Julie Fitzpatrick of the College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences at the University of Glasgow and 14 industry experts in nutrition, public health, education, food retail and production, ethics, fisheries, catering and community development - Spear will advise Scottish ministers on how they should move forward. The first meeting of this high-flying group of unpaid volunteers is on March 18.

It's a tall order, given current levels of obesity, diabetes and heart disease in the population and especially in the young - much of it arising from a chronic disconnection with nourishing, fresh food.

She's quick to acknowledge this when we reunite over a rather healthy glass of wine. "There will be people who are sceptical about this; people who ask 'what's the chef of a top-end restaurant in Skye doing when there is so much poverty and diet-related illness in cities like Glasgow?'," she says. "But running a posh restaurant is not my roots and I'm as affected as anyone else by what's going on. While we're aware of crisis and the need to address problems connected to diet and health, I don't want us to be a harbinger of doom and gloom. People have had enough of that. Making them feel guilty or that they're a burden on the NHS isn't going to help. I want to bring the fun back into food. I've been being told to lose two stone for years by my GP, and look at me!

"There are lots of other hidden agendas that need to be addressed. I want this to be encompassing, collaborative, not top-down. Treating people like grown-ups, perhaps reconnecting them to their culinary past by asking them for their family stories. Maybe their great-grandfather was originally an east coast fisherman, or an Aberdeen farmer. There are so many connections with food and how we ate in the past that we can tap into." Other early ideas for discussion are appointing local food champions, and the feasibility of bringing back free milk to primary school children.

She'd like to rally women to the cause. "If you look at the culinary heritage of Scotland it's about women," she says. They were cooks, scullery maids, hunter-gatherers; it was women who got the salmon off the river and the deer off the hill. But they were never given the credit; they were just expected to get on with the job. That continued right up until the 1950s and early 1960s when if you were a boy who showed skill in cooking, you were hailed as something special. That never happened with women.

"Then "Superwoman" Shirley Conran came along with her catchphrase Life's Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom. I remember thinking, 'if life's too short for that life isn't worth living'." My generation was the first to get the Equal Pay Act in 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975, but we were still going to the shops on the way home from work and cooking the evening meal; there was no such thing as a ready meal then. We had to use our cook books and learn how to do it. It was very different to how it is now.

"The nature of food shopping is changing as we speak. A huge amount is now done online by consumers in their 30s and 40s. How are we going to get them to buy local if they're buying online?

"They can't check the quality of the vegetables, see the meat, check their chicken, if they're looking at a picture on a website."

She acknowledges there is a lot for the Commission to think about. She frets that hers is the last living generation to pass on inherited food skills and knowledge, and hopes time is not running out. But as she points out, life has been a permanent race against time for her as a chef in remotest Skye.

Meanwhile, though settled in North Berwick, some 40 miles from her home town of Peebles, she is 100% involved with running the restaurant, which got its first star last year under chef-director Michael Smith. She and her husband Eddie still own it: "We hold all the risk and all the debt." Their son, Steven, is restaurant manager at Martin Wishart's The Honours brasserie in Edinburgh, and has two children. Their daughter Lindsay is a trained actor working as a hotel inspector of VisitScotland and Sarah is also working in the hotel industry in Skye.

Spear first met Eddie in 1974 when she was 22 and working in the British Gas press office in Basingstoke and London after leaving DC Thomson in Dundee, where she'd started her career at 17 as an editorial assistant on the weekly magazine Family Star. She started as the Horoscope writer and preparing readers' letters and stories for publication, and shared a flat with the broadcaster Frieda Morrison, the editorial assistant on Secrets magazine who also wrote the Fiona social column for the Dundee Courier.

"We were on £7 a week and we were all holding out for a job on Jackie magazine, which was regarded as the holy grail. We weren't allowed to talk in the office and we'd all look across at each other crunching crisps during breaks," she recalls fondly. "But I learned everything about print. I had to run up and down to the caseroom with linotype galleys and page proofs. The artists' room was full of interesting creative people sitting on stools. It the early 1970s and really fantastic experience for a young girl like me."

In Basingstoke she worked on the British Gas staff newspaper, and transferred to London's Marble Arch with responsibility for getting its products - cookers included - onto the women's pages of newspapers and magazines. This necessitated the wining and dining of women's editors of the glossies, which allowed her to try different restaurants.

Headhunted for a job at East Midlands Gas, she needed to learn to drive quickly, and Eddie's was the nearest driving school to the office. He had been working in the fabric and furniture department of Terence Conran's upmarket store Heal's in London, and became the youngest manager Habitat had ever had when he opened the Bromley store. His first marriage had broken up and he'd fled to a Kibbutz in Israel for six months; just recently returned, driving instruction was a way to make money for his baby daughter Sarah.

His new pupil was instantly attracted: "He had lots of naturally curly dark hair and drank lots black coffee and smoked cigarettes and was really very calm and quiet," Spear recalls. "He has been my rock ever since."

She never took the job. They married in 1976 and when she was pregnant with Steven she found commuting from Croydon too much. "We moved to Skye because we wanted our children to grow up in Scotland. When we saw the old cottage building close to the loch at Colbost, it was the romantic dream come true." They opened the Three Chimneys in 1984 with no professional training or experience of the hospitality industry between them; Eddie did front of house and she learned how to cook with local produce such as Bracadale crab, Skye lobster, local lamb, leaves and vegetables, and the rest is history.

Given the continued success of her "high risk gamble" thirty years ago, and her delight in her new high-profile challenge, it just goes to show that appearances aren't everything.

LIFE AND LOVES

Life and Loves: Shirley Spear

Greatest influence: F. Marion McNeill, author of The Scots Kitchen.

Best personality trait: Being too much of a perfectionist. That's also my worst.

Best piece of advice received: Walk tall and hold your head up high, from my mum.

Worst piece of advice received: Skye is not the place to try to run a 5-Star business. (From a banker in the 1990s.)

Favourite meal: Homemade soft cheese ravioli starter, wild rabbit stew as the main course and a bowl of fresh cherries to finish. (I had this on a farm courtyard high in the Italian Dolomites, circa 1970.)

Last book read: The Black House, by Peter May.

Favourite holiday destination: Pissouri, Cyprus.

Ideal dinner guests: James Naughtie, Raymond Blanc, Billy Connolly, Al Pacino, Mark Knopfler, Eddi Reader. (Only 6? I could do with seats for many more!)