Yeah, exactly. Although in addition to the text acting as SEO, the initial reasoning behind all the "recipes-as-blogs" approaches is that recipes are not in general copyrightable, as they aren't generally considered creative works. (Whether the food itself is a creative work is not the question, it's whether the text qualifies as such.) So cookbook/recipe blog writers add enough text to the recipe to make the content subject to copyright protections.

Then, as you note, when people do inevitably copy the recipe, they churn out new replacement text.

You'll notice, for instance, that a recipe 'database' site like allrecipes doesn't have these massive text blocks associated with user-posted recipes, because there's no need or desire to have those be copyrighted.

Great point.

There are fundamentally 2 types of content, although the line is getting blurred : The hobbyist blog, and the publishers magazine.

The first exists for joy, the second only exists to deliver adverts.

THe blurring occurs because some of the blogs became such hot property the founders sold up.