I was watching Good Eats the other evening. The subject was tea, and Alton mentioned that OF COURSE you always added the tea to milk, not milk to tea.
Why?
Does adding milk to tea immediately release a deadly cloud of Phosgene gas?
Is it a social miscue that inevitably leads to pistols at dawn?
Why? Why? Why?
This is one contentious issue that you will probably find has no factual answer. This thread will likely be moved to Cafe Society or IMHO. Anyway, I prefer to add tea to milk rather than the other way around because the two mix very nicely when it’s done that way. If you add milk to tea, you have to stir it up with a spoon. That leads to mess and noise. No thanks. I once read that the practice of putting milk in your teacup first was done to avoid “scalding the milk”, but I now believe that is bunk.
Milk-first has one practical advantage, in that it prevents the scalding-hot tea cracking your finest porcelain. Of course, this rarely is relevant 
Tea-first makes it easier to make sure you put in the amount of milk that you want, whereas it’s easy to overdo it if the milk is first. Other than that, there’s no difference.
This question comes up quite frequently. Just a couple of weeks ago: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=296484
You won;t get a factual answer. It comes down to preference and most of the factual reasons given for one way or another are nonsense.
Since this was discussed so recently, I’ll close this thread and direct further comment to the earlier thread, linked to above.
bibliophage
moderator GQ