Strange. I'm on OSX 10.8.4, Ruby 2.0.0p247. I spent a lot of time examining this problem. In FOOD_DES.txt the issue was Windows curly quotes around “G performance O 2” (line 4284), and in NUTR_DEF.txt it was the micro sign. Did you test with your target database in UTF-8? The errors I got were PG-related on INSERT.