Until now, at the pantry at Bread and Life and countless other organizations, volunteers have handed out bags or boxes of presorted soup cans, rice, bread and other mainstays whether or not the recipient needed or wanted it all.

“It’s not dignified,” Anthony Butler, the executive director, said. “People don’t shop like that.”

The computer terminals are the first of their kind in the country to be used in this way, as far as he has been able to tell, Mr. Butler said. He owes a debt of gratitude, perhaps fittingly for a man in the food business, to an anonymous waiter in a New York City restaurant, the name of which is already forgotten.

Mr. Butler, 47, was stumped by the question of bringing choice into the pantry at the new center. Other pantries that offer options use a supermarket-style layout, with clients shopping with carts in aisles, but that would have taken up too much costly space in New York.

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