Michele Tabora displayed four tubs of Italian ice, with flavors like “Lipsmakin’ Lemon,” “Mm Mm Mango” and “Watch Hill Watermelon.” She smiled and apologized as visitors demanded a taste of the product.

“Sorry, but there are no samples right now,” she said.

Tabora, manager of Emilee’s Italian Ice, had run out of spoons because of the event’s increasing popularity but would soon return to serving her all-natural, cholesterol-free, dairy-free, fat-free and kof-k kosher dessert.

She was among the 120 exhibitors swarmed at the 12h annual Boston Vegetarian Food Festival Saturday. The festival, sponsored by the Boston Vegetarian Society (BVS), attracted between 10,000 and 12,000 people to the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center at Roxbury Community College, said Evelyn Kimber, president of BVS.

Roxbury resident Pelaiah Auset, 30, said she had been to the event before and that this year’s festival was more crowded.

“I just wanted to see if they had new information,” she said. “And I enjoyed it. It was really packed.”

BVS, now celebrating its 20th year, is an all-volunteer non-profit organization geared toward advancing vegetarian living in Boston through education, community outreach and other programs, Kimber said.

The Boston Vegeterian Food Festival is among BVS’s largest annual events to promote “a community among vegans and vegetarians,” Kimber said.

Among other eating and educational events, BVS holds a vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner every November.

“We want to show the why’s and how’s of going vegan and vegeterian, and show them the huge variety of food available to them,” she said. “We also want to give people the opportunity to hear well-known, national speakers.”

Visitors gathered in the second-floor speaker room to hear lectures by medical speaker Michael Greger, chef Colleen Patrick-Goudreau and bodybuilder Robert Cheeke, among others.

Greger, who was welcomed by clapping, foot-stomping and yelling, discussed highlights from the 7,193 articles published on human nutrition last year.

The articles included studies on the correlation between meat and dairy consumption and prostate, skin and breast cancer and other health issues. Greger showed studies proving that habitual cocoa intake lowers blood pressure, soy proteins prevent increase in abdominal fat and green tea protects against breast cancer.

One study showed that eating three leaves of spinach a day would cut the risk of skin cancer in half.

“The Greger motto is eat your greens every day of your life until you die,” he said.

Junior human resource management major Samantha Wong said she enjoyed Greger’s presentation.

“He was a very good speaker,” she said. “It was entertaining but informative. He had a good selection of studies.”

Laura Quaranta, member of the Husky Energy Action Team (HEAT) and Students for Environmental Action (SEA), volunteered for BVS at the food festival. Quaranta is working with HEAT and SEA to co-sponsor a vegetarian awareness campaign on campus.

The campaign, which will include a vegan cookout at Centennial Commons during activities period Wednesday, is aimed to expose students to confrontations about their diets.

“I think it’s a scholarly environment and I think people are becoming educated on the issues,” she said. “You just can’t justify [eating meat.]”

Eric Prescott, co-founder of the Boston Vegan Association (BVA), spoke at the Curry Student Center West Addition Tuesday as part of the campaign.

“Good health starts when you’re young, and the benefits of a vegan diet, to prevent disease and improve health, have been very clearly demonstrated in recent years,” he said.

Prescott also mentioned the human rights issues presented by the meat industry.

“If you took food fed to animals alone in the US, we could feed an extra eight million hungry people,” he said.

Prescott, who founded the BVA after his recent move to Boston, said he was surprised by the number of health food stores and vegan restaurants in the city. He said this availability is among the reasons Bostonians should adapt a vegan diet.

“We’ve grown up eating all sorts of stuff like hamburgers and ice cream,” he said. “Now there’s alternatives to these products that are quite good, so people have fewer and fewer excuses to not go vegan.”

Quaranta said people are vegetarian or vegan for four reasons: environmental concerns, human rights issues, animal rights issues and nutrition.

“If something is not essential to your survival as a human, then there’s no reason to buy it if other beings are suffering in the process of its production,” she said.