What's the best way of storing options in mySQL? As descriptive strings or integers that are associated with each string.

Let's say I have this question in my UI: 

What's your favorite ice cream flavor?

* Vanilla
* Chocolate
* Strawberry

Is it better to store those in the DB as 1, 2, 3 in an INT(1) field or as strings vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry, in a CHAR field? I know the INT field will be faster, but probably not drastically unless there's tens of thousands of rows.

If they're stored as strings then I wouldn't need to do any extra PHP code, whereas if they're stored as numbers, I'd have to define the value of 1 = vanilla, etc... 

What's the general consensus on this?