Comment by sattoshi

I'm a fan. Other examples: https://www.sbs.com.au/food/recipes https://www.bbc.com/food/recipes With a light sprinkling of meat propaganda: https://www.trueaussiebeefandlamb.com/recipes/

The reason for the stories, I think, comes to a matter of US copyright law. For the most part, recipes themselves (ingredients and basic steps) are not protected under copyright. Any extraneous fluff added to the article is, though.

That, and the longer you sit on a site, and the more you have to scroll, the more likely you are to click on an advertisement and earn them some revenue.

scroll scroll scroll ah, finally the ingredients.

The stories are there because you have to be Don Draper to convince people to eat some of the recipes people put on the internet.

I’ve seen macaroni and cheese recipes that should have been called mayonnaise w/ pasta. One recipe for Spanish rice, wish I’d saved the url just to prove it existed, called for ketchup and soy sauce. I’m not sure if that was a prison recipe or if someone actually thought it was good and served it to their family.

IMO there is a huge need for curation and review on the recipe sites, not just the mindless screen scraping that’s been the norm for so long. And you might not know it from watching the food network but there are other genres of food besides Italian and “tacos”.

Some say it has to do with SEO purposes. There is a browser extension that directly shows the recipe itself called Recipe Filter.