Every night at Haven’s Kitchen, our recreational cooking school on West 17th Street, the teachers gather 14 students around the main island and ask the same questions: “Why do you want to cook?” “Why don’t you like to cook?” “What would help you enjoy the process more?”

The answers are remarkably consistent. Our students come to us for a fun night out or simply because they’re tired of burning their onions and serving dry chicken. They’re not sure when to flip their steak or how to get evenly roasted sweet potatoes. They want to recreate flavors and dishes they’ve seen on Instagram or tried at a restaurant. They’ve come because they want to be healthier and gentler on the environment. They understand that cooking brings families together and it’s less expensive than takeout.

But they’re tired. Or they’re in a rut. They don’t want to invest their time and energy into making a meal that disappoints them. Why spend hours shopping, chopping and cleaning for clumpy rice, limp salad and flavorless meatballs?

I opened Haven’s Kitchen in 2012 to build people’s confidence and pleasure in the kitchen. That same year, another type of home cooking business was born: the online meal kit. Blue Apron (the traditional uniform worn by French chefs in training) and Plated were both founded by Harvard MBAs with the same goal as mine: to get more people cooking.

But while we were teaching students how to roast a juicy chicken and evenly dice an onion, the meal kits were after a much loftier goal: to Disrupt Cooking. They wanted to radically simplify the process by delivering ingredients and recipes directly to people’s doors, making it as convenient and foolproof as possible. Tech investors loved it.

Put the word “disrupt” in front of something and you’re the next Steve Jobs, apparently. In the next few years, venture capital money poured into an increasingly crowded meal-kit market.

Meal kits made a big promise but were built on what I call the “We’ll figure it out” business model: Raise tons of money, focus on top-line sales, spend like crazy on marketing to drive those sales and eventually figure out a way to be profitable. That model has been all the rage these past few years. Sometimes it works. But sometimes it doesn’t, as we’ve seen with WeWork’s valuation nosediving from $47 billion to a fraction of that in just eight weeks.

Today, many meal-kit companies have quietly closed. Others (Plated and Home Chef) have sold to traditional grocery stores or other meal-kit companies (Purple Carrot, Green Chef). Blue Apron has lost around 95 percent of its share price after an IPO valued the company at over $1 billion in 2017.

I don’t know a lot about investing. But I do know a lot about the kitchen, and here’s where meal kits went wrong: You can’t disrupt something as fundamental as cooking.

Technology can change the way people get a cab, or save work files or order takeout. And you can certainly create shortcuts and tools that make cooking more fun and convenient. But with cooking, people want to touch ingredients and connect with something elemental. An online subscription service that offers tiny baggies of cilantro may simplify the cooking process, but it also creates distance from it.

Most of our students tell us that when they did sign up for a meal kit service, they felt added pressure to use it. They felt guilty for creating so much packaging waste. They felt constricted by the recipes (I use that word lightly since adding together pre-measured bits of things is not quite a recipe). And then, like the vast majority of subscribers, they unsubscribed.

They missed the sense of accomplishment that comes with making a good meal. It didn’t build their confidence. It didn’t foster creativity or relaxation. They saved shopping time, perhaps, but not much money or prep/cleaning time, and putting together a kit produced a meal, but with the shortcut came a loss of satisfaction.

I think of it like riding a bike. Meal kits promised to be the training wheels, eventually getting folks to the “Look Ma! No hands!” moment. But therein lies the big miss. There is no “Look Ma!” moment.

Trying to fit food into the tech paradigm misses what’s at the heart of cooking. Food is sunlight and soil, human labor and human connection. It’s about value, not valuation. Blue Apron promised “A Better Way to Cook,” but nothing can replace the simple recipe: some basic skills, quality ingredients, a bit of guidance and a dash of love.

Alison Cayne is the founder of the Chelsea-based Haven’s Kitchen and the author of “The Haven’s Kitchen Cooking School,” and has recently launched a new range of cooking sauces in Whole Foods Market, Fresh Direct, Wegmans and other retailers.