"Cookies!" Elaine on Seinfeld famously announced on trying to fly first class. "They have cookies up here!"

But that was the '90s. Now they have celebrity chefs. Charlie Trotter has teamed with United, and Miami's Michelle Bernstein with American, to produce gourmet meals for first class passengers on international flights.

This is wonderful news to - what - 5% of the population? We sad sacks back in coach are left with whatever scraps the airlines deem suitable for our miserable existence.

But there's a bright side to this injustice. Flying coach - hungry, constricted, painfully aware of economic divides - we experience for perhaps the only time in our lives how much of the world lives vis a vis the United States. It is an invaluable lesson in global realities - our sole chance to approximate what it's like to live in a developing country.