combine results

[viveleroi0]

I know I have seen this on here before but for the life of me I cannot find it.
If I am searching an inventory system DB for all of the existing categories (not products but categories), I would get a listing of each category of each field. Like if I had a category named foods and three products in that cat, it would show:
Foods
Foods
Foods.

But I just want a small list of all different categories, but only one listing of each cat. So NOT:
Foods
Foods
Foods
Equipment
Equipment
Equipment,

but RATHER:

Foods
Equipment.

So, it combines all results for Foods into one listing, so I can have like a table of contents of all cats.

Any ideas?

[djBuilder]

mysql_query("SELECT DISTINCT category FROM product");

will return food once, not three times