On the question of who gets what meal, I can think of a
few other possible variables that haven't been mentioned:

1 The order in which tickets were bought;
2 The order of passenger names, alphabetically;
3 The order of actual passenger boarding.

If there are several attendants distributing meals,
each delivering to a different assigned seating area,
the order in which they come to the pickup point
could be random, possibly causing distribution anomalies.

Dave Oesterreich