On Saturdays, the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center in Roxbury is usually filled with athletes.

But last Saturday, a few steps from the locker rooms, it was filled with curried tofu, toasted garlic pita bread and animal rights activists for the ninth annual Vegetarian Food Festival.

Dozens of attendees walked around with shopping bags from Whole Foods Market, sampling food and gaining perspective into the food lifestyle of vegetarians and vegans.

“The feedback and comments from speakers was just fabulous,” said Evelyn Kimber, the president of the Boston Vegetarian Society (BVS).

The 18-year-old group organized the event.

“Our first festival was at [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology], the second was at Bunker Hill [Community College]. Then we found the Reggie Lewis Center, it’s a beautiful facility. We’re bursting at the seams. The energy in the room is always very high.”

The purpose of the festival is to bring together exhibitors of vegetarian and vegan food, she said. Kimber has been a vegetarian for 20 years.

“I long had a burden on my heart for the suffering of the animals,” Kimber said. “The greatest motivation for me [to become a vegetarian] was the treatment of animals. The public is not well aware of the vast amount of cruelty and suffering.”

Trish Ferro, former housing coordinator for Residential Life at Northeastern, attended the festival and said it was a great idea, even though she is sticking with her current diet because she could not give up chicken.

Ferro said she wouldn’t have known she had eaten vegetarian chicken if someone hadn’t told her.

“[The festival] is fantastic, it makes vegetarianism more public,” she said.

Among the sampling were groups promoting their cause for animal rights or promoting a vegetarian lifestyle.

Seth Partner, a member of Speak Out for Animal Rights since its formation in May, said his group was attending the festival to “publicize what goes on and a general message about factory farming.”

“It’s a philosophy of animal rights,” Partner said. “It’s not our right [to eat animals], they are living and have feelings.”

Among political purposes, the festival included 100 exhibitors, food sampling, cooking demonstrations and festival discounted shopping.

David Dennis, an exhibitor at the festival, runs a vegetarian bed and breakfast, The Shady Hollow Inn in South Dennis.

“[The hotel] was an instant success,” Dennis said. “We saw a need for a vegetarian bed and breakfast.”

He said there are two other vegetarian bed and breakfasts in New England, one in Maine and one in Vermont.

“Ours is at a beautiful location in nature, and the nature ties right in with our food,” Dennis said.

The hotel prepares food in their vegetarian kitchen for their guests’ dietary needs. The Shady Hollow Inn is a renovated 1839 sea captain’s house, Dennis said.

Kimber said vendors like Dennis heard about the festival through word of mouth and signed up as early as this summer. She said the vendors came from all over the country as well as locally.

For more information about vegetarianism visit the Boston Vegetarian Society’s Web site, www.bostonveg.org.