Ruello was commissioned last year by the mussel industry to develop a code of practice for quality, size and handling. He found this an ironic coincidence, since his father Nino, from Calabria, had set up Australia's first mussel farm in Botany Bay in the 1950s. As a teenager, Nick ate so many mussels at home that he was almost sick of the sight of them, but his taste had returned by the time he began the research.

"I followed them from the growers all along the marketing chain, and I kept buying five-kilo packs to cook at home," he says. "I'd heard this theory that you shouldn't eat them if they're closed, but my wife said that didn't make sense, because mussels just close their shells to protect themselves when they are put under stress. "I tracked the theory to an English cookbook by Jane Grigson from 1975. It seems to be a safety precaution that arose because of fear of litigation at a time when some European mussels were dredged from polluted beds. "By the 1980s all the cookbooks and magazines were saying it and by the '90s the tech colleges were teaching it. But it doesn't apply to Australian farmed mussels."

His research, unveiled to the industry last week, also disposed of another myth. He found that you cannot fatten mussels by putting them in water with flour or oatmeal. Confronted with such alien foodstuffs, they just clam up. One theory suggests that putting mussels in water with polenta might make them spit out their sand. But under those circumstances, Ruello says, they might sense danger and try to spawn - releasing their eggs or sperm and ending up a much slimmer creature than most of us would like to eat.

Ruello sees great potential in the mussel industry, if we can just get past some of these myths. "There's nothing cleaner or greener above or below the surface," he says. "They don't need feeding. They drink a lot, but they're not noisy drunks." Australia's blue shelled mussels (sometimes wrongly called black) are mostly grown in long "socks" suspended from ropes attached to buoys. They live off plankton in the southern seas from Jervis Bay to Perth, with the biggest ones coming from Tasmania. Females look more orangey than males, but taste the same. We eat about 3000 tonnes a year. Those big green-lipped mussels from New Zealand offer no serious competition. In the course of his investigations, Ruello found a curious cultural difference.

"Any New Zealand greens that come into Australia are frozen or preserved in some way, and we find them rubbery and tasteless, so I was curious to try the live version," he said. "But even in New Zealand I thought they were boring. To me they have nothing like the flavour of our blues, but the New Zealanders throw away tonnes of blues a year, and they can't imagine why we prefer them."

In his report to the industry, Ruello said: "The industry's R&D program undertaken by Ruello & Associates has identified that there is no need to discard Australian farmed blue mussels which do not open after cooking. "Extensive cooking tests show that some mussels do not open up even after prolonged cooking and the flesh becomes overcooked. These tests also showed that some mussels which have opened up and removed from cooking have in fact been undercooked ... "The now common concern about mussels not opening after cooking is therefore misdirected. Extra care should be taken to examine mussels before cooking to ensure that only live or fresh mussels are cooked."

Ruello offers this advice to mussophiles: if you find a mussel open before cooking, tap the shell. If it doesn't close, smell it, and if you don't like the smell, throw it away. To ensure even cooking, put no more than two layers of shells in the pan with the garlic, parsley and white wine, and take them off the heat within five minutes. You can tell a mussel is cooked when it has tightened up and come away from the edge of the shell.

In a restaurant, be led by your nose. If a mussel smells off, it may have tainted the entire bowl, and you should feel free to send them back. Despite his teenage excesses and his latest exhaustive research, Ruello remains a fan: "Mussels are as sexy as oysters - they've got all the right minerals - but the farmers seem to have kept that to themselves." His next project is likely to be less pleasant. Ruello has to research a fish called the escolar, which is alleged to have "a laxative effect" on 50 per cent of those who eat it. Test subjects may be harder to find.