Question: I was wondering how can I have my users pick their favorite food from a category of foods in my MySQL database.

Will I need two different tables? If so what will my second table look like?

Here is my MySQL food table structure.

```
id | parent_id | food | url

```

Answer: 
You'll need 3 tables in total:

1. Food - holds food information
2. Users - holds users information
3. Users\_Food - holds user id + food id (and maybe a ranking)

You should probably read up on [database normalization](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization).
You'd need to make a second table:

`user_id | food_id`

Make them both primary.
Then you can use JOIN's to select the food:

```
SELECT f.food, f.url
FROM user_food AS u 
INNER JOIN food AS f ON (f.id = u.food_id)
WHERE u.user_id = {USER_ID}

```

This will give you a list of all favorite foods set by the user.