I suspect that many people did not understand what I meant about forces at play and that patterns describe a solution to bring some harmony among the forces in the problem in a particular context.  For the example of the airplane and wanting to serve the right meal to the right person, the challenge is to serve the meal without knowing about the seating arrangement on the plane, and still sequentially access each seat.  Let’s look at how to get rid of the need to know the seating arrangement.
We start with the solution where we need to know the arrangement of seating and number of seats too.  BTW, it’s ruby code.

for row in (0..29) do # 30 rows
    for pos in (0..5) do # seat A-F
       passenger = airplane.seats[row][pos]
       next if passenger.nil?
       passenger.serve_meal("nut free") if passenger.meal() == "nut free"
    end
end

Of course, if we know the seat number, for example, 15C, then we can do this.  But that does not help at all.

airplane.seats[14][2].serve_meal("nut free") if airplane.seats[14][2].meal() == "nut free"

But, we still expose the data structure of the seats.  So, let’s make it a little better by using the iterator pattern on the data structure for the seats.

airplane.seats.each do |row|
  row.each do | passenger |
    next if passenger.nil?
    passenger.serve_meal("nut free") if passenger.meal() == "nut free"
  end
end

We could be cuter and do something like this and hide the seats array, but we still expose the numbering scheme of the seating.

airplane.serve_meal("15C", "nut free")

So, we can have the iterator on the seats data structure, which helps a bit.  But we can make it a lot better if we put an iterator on the airplane itself. Now, we just care about occupied seats.

airplane.each_occupied_seat do |passenger|
  passenger.serve_meal("nut free") if passenger.meal()
 == "nut free"
end

In the airplane class, we have the following.

class airplane
  ...
  def each_occupied_seat &block
    @seats.each {|row| row.each { |pos| yield pos if not pos.nil?} }
  end
end

We are using iterators on the encapsulated seats structure and exposing a new iterator for the airplane. Also, we are only work with seat that has a passenger

So, we started out with a deep need to know the structure, layout and limits of the seating in the airplane. Then we started hiding the data structure for the seats, put iterators on this seats data structure which helped a bit.  But the real breakthrough happened when we started asking the airplane to just give us a way of sequentially accessing each seat that had a passenger.  No more conflicting forces, just a simple harmonious way to access each occupied seat on the plane.  And when the plane seating changes, we don’t care.