[logfromblammo]

The simple truth is that the core recipes are fact-based and non-copyrightable, and the 1000-word blogspam recipe header is both copyrightable and garners better search result rankings.

So the business model is to take facts from the public domain, wrap it in bullshit prose, and then SEO the bullshit to have higher ranking than the naked source facts, for more unique visitors and ad revenue.

Making comments about "providing recipes for free" are exactly as useful as comments about "providing phone numbers for free" or "providing mailing addresses for free" or "providing the original text of 'Little Women' for free" or "providing the steps of the long division algorithm for free".

Obfuscating the public domain is not a valuable service. Automatically removing the obfuscation is valuable. A "Project Gutenberg" style repository of recipes would be recurringly donation-worthy.