They're playing by rules they didn't invent. The belief is this content gets indexed better than just recipes (which, when well written, are terse) and it should be placed above the recipe so it has higher priority. They might be mistaken but with the limited amount of information Google gives, and the fact that most places I stumble across on Google are doing it, I'm ready to believe it works.

Any of those recipe sites? they'll read through several minutes of navigations, links, ads, and story before getting to the site. I feel badly for anyone who must listen to that, i.e. who doesn't have an option to read it visually, what a horrible experience.