MARTIN WISHART

Almost became a butcher after leaving school at 15

INFLUENCES I was very influenced by the late Keith Floyd in his first TV series Floyd On Fish. I was 13 or 14, and from the age of about 12 had been cooking in my mum's kitchen, usually pizza. Those experiences pushed me to leave school at 15 and the choice was to be a chef or a butcher. From watching Keith Floyd, I reckoned being a chef would give me a wider range of experiences.

SCOTLAND We've got very different seasons, colder winters and good springs for lamb grazing. It's got the right climate for growing berries, picking wild mushrooms and an absolutely superb collection of game: hare, venison, roe deer, rabbit and birds.

HEALTH We need more celebrity ambassadors to promote Scottish produce to ordinary people. They need to be talking about our produce via advertising billboards and television campaigns, followed up with school visits. Chris Hoy would be a fantastic ambassador, as would Scottish footballers. We need to remove a lot of fast and convenience foods from supermarkets. As long as that option is there, people will go for it. Educating the population about the benefits of eating fresh and local needs to begin at school.

DESERT ISLAND DISH Reestit mutton, tattie soup and a bowl of mussels from Walls in Shetland.

AND FINALLY Would I prefer to listen to Meat Is Murder by The Smiths, or Who Killed Bambi by the Sex Pistols? It would have to be Who Killed Bambi as I hate The Smiths. Having said that, I've personally never killed anything with four legs.

Martin Wishart is executive head chef at the Michelin-starred Restaurant Martin Wishart in Leith; patron of The Honours Brasserie, Edinburgh; Martin Wishart at Cameron House, Loch Lomond; and Martin Wishart Cook School. He is also chef for The Herald Magazine.

*****

NICK NAIRN

Learned to cook while a student at the Glasgow School of Nautical Studies

CHILDHOOD My earliest food memory is making soup with my mum, aged seven. I have a clear memory of chopping vegetables with a knife and helping her to make a broth made with ham stock. When I first made my own soup, I didn't put in any stock and it was minging. Not a lot of people know that, but that mistake is how I learned how to do it properly.

THE NAVY Having been brought up in a household where the food was delicious but conservative, it was a revelation to me when, having joined the Royal Navy, I was in Singapore and saw the street kids making fantastic chicken sati. They used biscuit tins as cookers and fanned the flames with their feet. The peanut sauce had whole chillies and coriander stalks and it blew my mind. That's when I realised food could be so much more.

STUDENT Later, as a student at the Glasgow College of Nautical Studies I had run out of money and couldn't afford to eat out. So I went and bought a frying pan, a wooden spoon and Elizabeth Kent's Country House Cookery from the 1970s. I made a chicken Indian, breast stuffed with hazelnuts, bananas and curry cream sauce.

SCOTLAND In Scotland the combination of climate and geography is unique, and is everything we need to grow good food. It's still a mystery to me that Scottish produce is so much more highly regarded in continental Europe than at home. The vast majority of the fish caught at Peterhead market is exported. I've been doing my best to change that for 20 years and we've got to keep going. We still have a long way to go.

DESERT ISLAND DISH Either a large plate of grilled langoustines with garlic butter, or a bacon-and-egg roll.

AND FINALLY Have I ever had to deal with a slippery customer? I'd say the biggest slippery customers are those who post comments on TripAdvisor. They are people with an axe to grind, who can write the most appalling reviews where not a word is true, and they don't even need to have eaten at the restaurant they write about.

Nick Nairn is chef-patron of Nick Nairn Cook Schools at Aberdeen and Port of Menteith, Stirlingshire.

*****

PAUL KITCHING

Uses old-fashioned sweets in his dessert menu

SWEETIES When I was five or six, I loved going to the local sweetie shop to buy black jacks, fruit salad chews, McGowans toffee chews and coconut mushrooms. I'd buy 20 from the penny tray at the van that would come round our way. Swizzles and Love Hearts were a big thing for me and I still use them in my desserts, scrunched into powder. It's fun because nobody can guess what it is.

THE DOLE Unemployment spurred me into becoming a chef. As a youngster I was working on building sites, and I got laid off one winter so I went to the Jobcentre and saw a vacancy for a trainee chef in Newcastle. The head chef was a 78-year-old woman called Nancy, from Sicily, and she taught me so many things about how to hand-make pasta, enchiladas, pizza bases.

SCOTLAND I think there's a huge food culture in Scotland, much more exciting than in England. I've been here for four years now and every single conversation I hear is about food, what people had for lunch and what they're having for dinner.

DESERT ISLAND DISH Jacket potato with cottage cheese, chives, onion and pineapple. Especially a big fat one with crispy skin.

AND FINALLY Am I a nippy sweetie or do I love myself so much that if I were chocolate I'd eat myself? I'm bit of a nippy sweetie when things don't go to plan in the kitchen, though I'm not shouty. I like to kill my boys with kindness. When they do something wrong I'll put my arm round them, give them a beer then ask them how on earth they managed it.

Paul Kitching is chef-patron of the Michelin-starred 21212 restaurant in Edinburgh.

*****

ROY BRETT

From fisherman to seafood chef

FAMILY I remember having steak pie for lunch every Sunday from the age of about six. Sunday was the one day the whole family would eat together. It was homemade by mum, with beef bought at Proudfoot butchers in Edinburgh. Everybody used to queue at the local butcher's in those days.

ANGLING I got into fish through my dad, who would take me fishing for brown trout on the Spey.

SCOTLAND We're very lucky to have such seasonal variety in our climate and our crops. I love that early autumn squashes and purple carrots are coming in now. We're also lucky with our responsible sustainable agri- and aquaculture.

HEALTH There's nothing snobby about food, about celebrating being round the table eating together for 20 minutes a day. It's so important, but so many people don't have that opportunity because they're working hard to pay the mortgage or they're single parents. These are hard times for a lot of people. VAT and business rates make it very hard for artisan producers to get on the ladder. Yet what they're making is not poncy; it's real stuff. People say farmers markets are a lot of middle-class snobbery, but they're for everyone.

DESERT ISLAND DISH Give me a rod and a line and I'll catch a squid, clean and riddle it, put it on the barbecue and eat it with bacon and a spring onion salsa.

AND FINALLY Irn-Bru or coke with fish and chips? Definitely Irn-Bru. I love it, though my kids don't know that. It's delicious and very Scottish.

Roy Brett is head chef of Ondine seafood restaurant, Edinburgh, and culinary director at Loch Fyne Oysters in Argyll.

*****

TOM LEWIS

Career began with a love of baking

BEGINNINGS I hated cooking at first. In the beginning it was my mother who did all that, while I was farming the land and shearing the sheep but that didn't pay the bills. Then someone gave me two books, Larousse Gastronomique and Hilary Brown's La Potiniere And Friends, and I didn't look back.

PASSION I absolutely love baking and source most of my flour from Hutchison's of Kirkcaldy, who mill my special blends. I like bakers; they're very generous. I've never met a nicer bunch of people than bakers.

SCOTLAND I think what makes Scottish food so good is its simplicity and its seasonality. We can always look forward to the next thing, and Scottish tomatoes don't taste like any other.

HEALTH To help ordinary Scots appreciate our natural diet I would say don't make it pretentious. Every child should make a pot of soup at school.

DESERT ISLAND DISH Salad with warm honeycomb, and if it can be toasted then all the better, because the crust takes away the waxiness. We need more bees to make more honey.

AND FINALLY What's the most I've shelled out on kitchen equipment, and the greatest waste of dough? The most expensive thing I have is a £1200 secondhand bread mixer, which is a godsend. The thing I wasted most of my dough on was an electric knife sharpener, which does sharpen but which also ruins your knives. There's nothing to beat a good stone.

Tom Lewis is chef patron of Monachyle Mhor in Callander.

*****

ANDREW FAIRLIE

Uses Perthshire potatoes at his restaurant

CHILDHOOD My earliest food memory is sitting around the table every day eating potatoes with my parents, two sisters and three brothers. We'd mash them and make a well in the middle then pour in warm milk and a knob of butter. Delicious.

COOKING I was working in a hotel in Perth at age 15 and one Saturday a wedding meal was being served. I remember tasting the roast beef chasseur and getting one very particular flavour. I asked chef what it was. I'd never heard of tarragon before and it was like a light went on. I knew I wanted to be a chef.

SCOTLAND Although we moan about our climate, it's perfect for the things we're good at. The long light summers are very good for the crops we grow and our coastal waters are cold.

HEALTH The only way we're going to address the disconnect with what ordinary people choose to eat is to learn to cook at school.

DESERT ISLAND DISH Roast chicken stuffed with lemon and garlic.

AND FINALLY Do I plough my own furrow? Yes. It's only through seeking out the guys who are out there producing things that you find the good stuff.

Andrew Fairlie is head chef at his eponymous two-Michelin-starred restaurant at the Gleneagles Hotel in Auchterarder, Perthshire.

Scotland Food & Drink Fortnight runs until September 16. This year hundreds of events are scheduled, ranging from the Dundee Flower And Food Festival, Savour The Flavours and the first Taste Ayrshire Festival to farmers markets and artisan cheesemaking displays. Visit www.scottishfoodanddrinkfortnight.co.uk.