Create new sheet for each individual item

Ok, I am an unschooled user of excel, but have been using it for years. I am using now for tracking daily dietary info and was thinking of setting it up such that I have one file with all the base data (foods, calories, etc.), then have another file where I can simply click on a cell and the data from base data file will appear and all I have to do is select the food item. Is this possible?

The way I do it now, I have created one file and use tabs (one for each day) and simply copy all the data from one tab to another. This gets to be quite the pain in the butt and creates huge files.

Help is greatly appreciated, and please forgive me if I put it in the wrong place.

Thanks.