A comprative study on identifying the gastronomical accessibility problems of celiac disease in the city of Van

Accessible gastronomy expresses the equal access of every individual, who has or has not any physical, mental, biological, or etc. handicaps, to gastronomy destinations without being exposed to any kind of discrimination. On the contrary, focusing on mentally, visually, speech handicapped, and deaf people the present accessible gastronomy studies and practices are ignoring the biologically handicapped individuals who have difficulty in accessing due to their nutrition disorders. The aim of this study is to improve solutions to the abovementioned problems by analysing accessibility of the substructures of the food and beverage enterprises in the sense of celiacs as a biological handicap, and identifying the present situation and ongoing problems. In accordance with this purpose, two different meeting forms have been applied addressing to 8 celiac organizations, which are selected by snowball sampling method, and 11 food – beverage enterprises determined by convenience sampling method. As a result of the interviews with celiac organizations the findings indicate that; the celiacs have difficulty in finding gluten-free products in food and beverage businesses and even if they can find, they have to pay unreasonable prices; they have some trust issues with the businesses due to cross contamination risk; the personnel in businesses are lack of required training and knowledge and so they have a weakness for awareness of the disease and the legal regulations do not cover the problems of the celiacs. On the other hand, in the consequence of the interviews with food and beverage enterprises, it is conferred that the gluten free products are not high in demand; there is no official institution which offers educations to produce gluten- free products for the business employees and the legal regulations are not arranged in an encouraging way. Due to all these reasons, it is observed that the businesses are hesitating to produce gluten-free products. At the end of the study, there are suggestion solutions presented about the mentioned problems stated above.