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Re:Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages by JshWright on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @11:33AM (#14797324)
While it doesn't address your concerns about ethics, recipes are explicitly not covered by US copyright law (obviously there are other factors involved here, but that's certainly the big one).

There may be ethical questions here, but there shouldn't be any legal concerns (IANAL, just a guy in the process of building a site in this space).

Re:Show HN: An API for scraping recipe web pages by tinebak on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @12:09PM (#14797657)
Recipes aren't but images always are. Collections of recipes (such as a cookbook) are also protected.