This is the answer that is always trotted out, but it's unclear whether there is any truth to it being the reason bloggers actually add the stories. Heck, if that were the reason they wouldn't need three pages of content they could have a single paragraph, it would come to the same thing. It never made any sense to me that recipe bloggers would need to resort to putting pages upon pages of detailed life history in every single post, just on the off chance that someone is going to steal their meatloaf recipe and re-post it on another blog.

I was glad the OP article didn't mention that theory.

I actually really believe that reason #1 in the article was the origin -- people actually liked reading the stories. When recipe blogs were new, and there were fewer of them, it was common to actually check back on the blogs and see if they had posted new content. I used to follow a number of recipe blogs, including Orangette, which I really liked, and would both read her stories and try her recipes. She (like similar bloggers) developed enough of a following that she was then hired by the Times to write similar recipes and stories.

Heck, speaking of the Times, or other newspapers, they almost always intro a recipe with a story of some kind. This is not just for copyright reasons, but because people actually read them. (e.g. [1])

This audience is different from the one who just googles "Meatloaf recipe" and clicks on the one with the most stars. When you do that, then no, you generally don't want to hear the "life story." But maybe some readers do read it, it connects with them, and then they actually go back to that same site again.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/dining/citrus-salad-almon...

Recipes as in the steps to cook something, the algorithm, the steps and amounts and ingredients are not copyrightable.

The TEXT of a recipe is, at least to the extent it is minimally creative.

Huh? How does it protect my recipe if somebody takes just the recipe and sticks a different garbage story on the front end? Recipes as intellectual property is a stupid idea in the first place, but this seems like faulty logic here.

Well, if the bulk of the "value" of your page is the garbage story, it protects the bulk of the value just fine....