A few days ago diamond geezer wrote about the amount of milk which gets wasted in cafés, restaurants etc. when one orders tea (or in some places coffee).
Milk appears in a jug which almost always contains far more milk than one will ever need in tea, even if you are of the “half a cup of weak tea with half a cup of milk” persuasion.
(It doesn’t work so well for coffee as the barista is often adding the milk as part of the coffee-making process.)
I’m not like that — I dislike milk — preferring my tea strong and with a minimum of milk. Typically I put no more than a thimbleful of milk in a cup of tea. I’m the same with coffee on the rare occasions I drink it.

When I was working I used to buy tea from the in-house coffee bar. I’d order a large strong tea with just a splash of milk. The staff soon learnt that my splash of milk was just that, they went “plop” with the milk jug and that was enough. As a system that worked well as the staff dispensed the milk.
But go to one of the ever increasing choice of coffee bars and order tea. More often than not it comes with a jug of milk. A few days ago we were in a central London Costa Coffee and having time to kill I had a pot of tea, and then another. Each pot of tea held just one cup (which I consider a little mean) and was served automatically with a tiny jug of milk — about an eggcup amount. Even after two pots of tea I had still used only half the first jug of milk. There’s good odds that as a consequence 1½ jugs of milk were thrown away, as food hygiene rules say that once served food cannot be reused. OK that’s partly my fault as I should have thought to decline the jug of milk with the second pot of tea.
Indeed decline milk is what we often do. When we do our supermarket shop (usually early on Friday morning) we always stop in Waitrose’s café for a drink and a bacon roll to fortify us for the fight ahead. I have a pot of tea and Noreen has plain filter coffee. Each comes with a jug of milk. But we always say “one milk between us is enough”; and it is — my two thimblefuls for my two cups of tea and Noreen’s generous addition to her coffee and there is usually still a dribble left in the jug.
Yes, jugs of milk are a good; they allow us to control the amount of milk we each want in our tea/coffee. And they are infinitely preferable to the horrid little plastic pots of milk, the quality of which always seems dubious because who knows what’s been done to the contents.
Individually we are talking about small quantities of milk. But as diamond geezer says, multiply that across every customer and every coffee outlet and we are wasting horrendous amounts of milk. And even if everyone doubled the amount of milk they took in tea or coffee we would still be wasting huge amounts.
Please can we get places to dispense less milk? Ultimately it will save them money!
And while we’re at it can we please ban hot milk as well?