What's interesting is as cost becomes less of an object, other than the wine it's not really true the ingredients in the first class meals are particularly any more expensive than they are in the economy class meal, it's just that there's just a lot more ingredients and they have greater diversity and as the price goes up and while it's true you get more, it's not as much more as one might think.
In fact in one the, shrimp is in the economy meal, first class gets salmon, which is cheaper than shrimp.
This portrays very graphically the single most important characteristic of human diet: diversity. The best meal isn't the same as the cheapest meal, but with more expensive ingredients - it would have been easy to make an extremely expensive version using exotic ingredients such as white truffles, wagyu beef, fugu and what have you, but that is not what makes meals "better" a larger number of more diverse ingredients does and that is very literally what's meant by "balanced diet".
