I suspect the "Recipe Life Story" nonsense was sparked by a highly-publicised (in SEO circles) study several years ago, which claimed the average #1 result in SERPs contained ~2000 words. This started a race to make every web page much longer than it needed to be. The obvious way to pad out a recipe is to add a phony, rambling life story to it.

Several Google updates later (and after much SEO-driven copycatting), it's difficult to crack the top 10 without ~1500 words of nonsense before the recipe.

This is why we can't have nice things.