They don’t.
The classic work is in the public domain. There’s no longer any copyright protection on it. Publishing the classic work does take a little effort though. There’s the effort of reformatting it for modern book sizes, making sure the line and paragraph breaks look good, etc. Then there are other costs like promotion and distribution. If they do that and publish it like that, nothing in their version is copyrighted either. Someone can duplicate the book exactly and sell copies, and there’s nothing the publisher can do.
But, if they put in Dr. Professor Bethany Hernandez-Leslie’s foreword, that part is a new work, and has a new copyright. Now if someone duplicates the book, they’ll be violating the copyright not on the original work, but on Bethany Hernandez-Leslie’s section.
It’s the same reason that every web site with a cooking recipe has a 10-page essay on how the author’s grandmother came up with the recipe. Nobody cares about that stuff, but recipes can’t be copyrighted, but the other blob of text can. If someone crops out the other text and just copies the recipe, it’s still possible that they could be sued for copyright infringement because it could be argued that the recipe is part of the bigger copyrighted work.
Omfg are you serious? That recipe story bullshit is because of capitalistic enshittification?!?
God we should just do away with money entirely. At this point I’d be happier with a punch based monetary system.
That’s a minor reason. The bigger reason is that a lot of food bloggers are bloggers and just posting recipes is super boring. So they write their stories because that’s what they actually want to share.
And even from a professional standpoint the Google Search Algorithm played a bigger role. Google rewards more unique content, so a story would do better than just a recipe.
And the story still doesn’t protect the recipe itself. You just can’t have people using a web scrapper to copy paste your entire content. But you can take the exact same recipe and add it manually into your cook book. You just have to go through the minimum effort of rewriting the steps.