* Latin America
   Most people can probably remember the moment when they first realised the seductive power and global pervasiveness of American culture.
   It is an extraordinary form of soft power which will endure even if the looming powerhouses of China, India and Brazil come to overshadow America's global economic dominance.
   Next time you see television pictures of an anti-American demonstration anywhere on earth look closely at the crowd. Among the flag-burners you'll almost certainly see someone wearing an LA Lakers shirt or a Yankees baseball cap.
   My first exposure to American culture came back in the Doris Days of the early 1960s, growing up in a Britain that was still shaking off the lingering effects of rationing and the costs of post-war reconstruction.
   We had Elvis, of course, and Hollywood but the world was a lot less global then. It was still possible, for example, for British recording artists to have hit records by simply recording their own versions of songs that were already hits for American stars on the far side of the Atlantic.
   But the flagship of American influence in my own life was Spam, the bright-pink pork luncheon meat that was a staple of the British working-class diet for several decades.
   So when the time came to find a way to round off my three years as the BBC's North America correspondent, it seemed somehow fitting to head not for the bright lights of New York or Chicago but for the less showy charms of Austin, Minnesota, home of the Hormel Food Company. Spam Central, in short.
   And it turns out that it's not fanciful at all to see Spam as a symbol of the spread of American influence.
   "It was World War II that made Spam international because American GIs brought it all over the world," he says. "And when there was food rationing in Britain and continental Europe, Spam was versatile, delicious, easy to transport and it kept a long time. Those are important qualities."
   It conjures up a strange new perspective on World War II - GIs struggling to get over the beaches of Normandy and across the sands of Iwo Jima before their arteries clogged up. But it makes you wonder if this is the reason why they put Spam in brick-shaped tins, because America used it to build its influence in a hungry post-war world.
   You are perhaps unlikely to stumble across the home of Spam unless you find yourself driving from Minneapolis to Des Moines but it's genuinely worth a visit as a case study in how an iconic brand helped to introduce a wider world to American brands and ideas.
   It is not much use as a nation-building tool in America's modern wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for example (pork, remember) but these are tough times in America and domestic sales are going rather well.