For me, a huge part of why I love food is because of how inextricably tied up it is with community and culture and history and everything like that. Some of my favorite media—Ratatouille, Midnight Diner, Julie & Julia—is about the way food connects us to ourselves and others. For me, the stories at the start of recipes are like that. They vary in execution, sure, and plenty are not that interesting or well-written, but that's true of any media.
I get why people would be annoyed with them. I understand why someone would go "I just want a recipe for macaroni and cheese; I don't need the story about how your grandma made a really good mac & cheese at Christmas one year." But me, I love those stories. Even if the recipe isn't their grandma's, it still evokes that memory for them at some level. Otherwise, that connection wouldn't have been made.1 Even if the blurb is written because of search engine optimization or copyright or whatever, it's still a story that the author wanted to be associated with that food. That association makes the food more meaningful to the author, and by extension to me as the reader.
Basically, food is good on its own. But it becomes much more special in context.
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Even if the story is fiction written for the website, that doesn't bother me. I like fiction too, and clearly this person wants this hypothetical mac & cheese to evoke those feelings of comfort and warmth.
