Shinto ritual sets shinsen before the kami in a fixed order, moving from foods considered most valuable to those considered least. Rice comes first, since rice is the staple that Shinto myth ties directly to the descent of the imperial ancestor and to the fertility of the land itself. Sake follows, brewed from the same rice, and after it come mochi, the pounded rice cakes eaten at New Year and other festivals. Fish comes next, arranged so that food from the sea and food from the mountains both appear on the stand, followed by fowl, then vegetables, then fruit, and finally salt and water, which close the sequence and are never omitted even when everything else is simplified.
A full shrine festival, a matsuri, may set out dozens of dishes in this order on tiered stands before the inner sanctuary, while an individual worshipper's daily offering at a household kamidana may reduce the whole sequence to a small dish of rice, a cup of water and a pinch of salt. What stays constant across every scale is the order itself: valuable foods first, plain sustaining ones last, so the offering reads the same whether it fills a shrine hall or a single household shelf. The food is prepared with particular care for cleanliness, since purity, not elaborateness, is what Shinto ritual asks of an offering.