Holy crap, girl. This is brilliant. Never thought of this in 40 years of sprouting. Thank you for this tip.
 
Reference for the rest of us guys in the dark, me included if I can explain what you are talking about. Where were you in my sprouting life 30 years ago?... On the hunt for grade school lunch trays with the next morning's light... Used the standard trays inverted for wheat grass but never thought about the spread and pressing function for normal sprouting application. Drip tray obviously needed beneath the lunch trays to avoid a mess. Couple bricks or rocks on the upper tray will do the trick.
 
All of us sprout freak guys here lie awake at night in fevered sweats, not knowing how to properly grow soy bean sprouts.  I feel their pain and my pain.  Things grow okay until less than a week when they have a tail about a third of an inch long and turning brown. Then there are the soy sprouts you get in a store or a Chinese egg roll that are 3 inches long. What do they know that we don't know.
 
Secret is applying genetic stresses that the grains are already primed to deal with. Weight pressure and think you would agree, darkness which is already in the equation with an opaque lunch tray.
 
Got to think like a bean and empathize what they are going through just trying to survive.
Grain drops to the ground ready to grow next springtime in the natural. If buried under massive debris and in the dark, life survival priority is on maintaining flexibility to navigate through a matrix of impediments until it can get thru the surface into sunlight. Once in the light, survival laws change. Now time to produce woody cellulose to withstand above ground conditions.
 
Means that if you can keep the germinating grain in the dark and under pressure, it thinks it is way under ground and has to keep flexible and long to reach the surface. No pressure or in light, the crop quickly develops woody cellulose. Lesser return and less edible.
 
Bummer for these little dudes is that there is a cannibal monkey about to devour them. Makes you weep, don't it?
 
John
 
 

They lended me out to Canada for a couple days so crashing north of the border out in the wild west The accommodations are much better than Chicago and parts otherwise
Yes makes me weep We are caught in a place of having to kill something to eat and survive  Principle is that we should take our food source from that which does manifest the least level of evolved consciousness  If an apple is available then spare the pig  We murder in our diet but tread more softly on the planet by killing the lesser life forms out of our necessity This also shifts the scale to less personal payback up the line whether physical or more long term