My Delco hoagie came in a godforsaken bag that said ‘Submarine’

Shortly after moving to this area 18 years ago, I stopped into the Fresh Grocer in West Philly one day to grab lunch in between assignments.

I went up to the sandwich counter, where some customers were waiting for their orders, and I politely requested “a roast beef sub.”

Or at least I thought I did. The reaction on the worker’s face behind the counter made me question if I’d accidentally ordered human liver and fava beans for lunch instead.

“You want a what?!? Where you think you’re at?” the worker said incredulously, before turning to the half dozen or so people waiting for their orders around me and announcing: “This lady just ordered a sub!”

A few people giggled, at least one gasped, and my face turned the shade of hot cherry pepper relish.

“We don’t call it a sub ‘round here! What do we call it?” the employee asked the small crowd, like she was leading Eagles fans in a call-and-response.

“A hoagie!” the people yelled.

“A what?” she asked again.

“A hoagie!” they repeated, while graciously sparing me the embarrassment of spelling the word out, letter by letter.

“That’s right, a hoagie,” the worker said, and whether it actually happened or not, I remember the crowd applauding her.

She then told me to go wait for my hoagie and said something about hoping I learned my lesson.

I learned two lessons in quick succession about Philly that day that stuck with me. The first: Philadelphians will embarrass the hell out of you, if you give them cause, but it’s almost always to save you further embarrassment down the road. This is one of the key traits of the city’s kind-but-not-necessarily-nice nature.

And the second lesson I learned that day was to never use the word sub to refer to a hoagie again.

So imagine my shock when I ordered a hoagie from a Delco shop recently and it came in a bag that had the word Submarine plastered in large, red letters upon it.

“What is this [trash]?!?” my husband said as he gazed with horror upon the packaging. (Except he didn’t use the word trash.)

In defense of my early use of the word sub, my first real job at 14 was as a hoagie maker at a shop called Cellini’s Subs in the small central Pennsylvania town of Montoursville.

There, everybody called sandwiches on oblong rolls subs. That being said, if somebody ordered a hoagie, I knew what they meant and I didn’t go around chastising them like a Catholic nun teaching grade school in the 1950s.

The job, which I held throughout high school, had its highs and lows. Before I could drive, my dad would pick me up from work in the middle of winter and insist on rolling all the car windows down, no matter how cold it was, because I smelled, mostly “like BO” and “feet,” but he occasionally threw other analogies in, too.

One of my father’s jobs was obviously to teach me humility.

I learned to make a mean hoagie at that little shop, as well as a pretty decent cheesesteak (for central Pa.), and I became very good at wrapping them, too. Even now, I find something oddly satisfying about neatly rewrapping a leftover hoagie.

The things we learn early in life imprint upon us, and even after 18 years of trying to rid the word from my vocabulary, sometimes I’ll still ask my husband, without hearing myself speak, if he wants to get subs for dinner.

“What?” he’ll ask.

“Subs,” I say.

“What?” he’ll ask again.

“Subs,” I say, until I realize my horrific mistake, shout, “Oh my God. I mean hoagies!” and ask him never to divulge what I’ve said, as I am doing right now (my dark secrets are mine alone to share).

Usually, we order hoagies from one shop near us in Delco and pizza and cheesesteaks from a different place. But the hoagie shop doesn’t deliver, and one night my husband and I didn’t feel like cooking or driving. So I ordered a roast beef hoagie for me and a cheesesteak for him from our local pizza shop.

No, I am not going to tell you the name of the shop, for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I want to eat there again. There’s nothing wrong with the food — it’s actually pretty great, even the hoagie I ordered — which makes the use of this mind-boggling bag even more befuddling.

The bag actually starts off at the top alright with: “Whether it’s a Hoagie” but things quickly nose-dive from there.

“Whether it’s a Hoagie — a Sub — or a Torpedo Sandwich — It’s the Best Tasting meal around,” reads an unattributed quote on the bag, in which common nouns are unexpectedly turned into proper nouns like they were Eliza Doolittle or guest stars on Bridgerton.

(And I hope this goes without saying, but whatever a Torpedo Sandwich is, it doesn’t even belong in the same category as a hoagie.)

In the center of the bag is a large illustration of a hoagie and above it, written in giant red letters twice the size of the rest of the font, it says: “Submarine.”

First of all, this bag’s laissez-faire attitude is completely false and misleading. I can’t believe it actually had a hoagie inside of it and wasn’t just filled with hot air.

Maybe it doesn’t matter what a hoagie is called wherever these bag makers are from, but calling it anything else around here is akin to saying you love the Cowboys.

Are there more pressing things in the world to be concerned about than culinary semantics? Absolutely, but being ridiculously petty about unimportant stuff to grease the pain of existence is an art form, and Philly is a true master of the craft. And when we get on a roll, oil bet you can’t stop us, try as hard as you mayo.

Like the Atlanta Braves mascot Blooper, this bag is completely superfluous, totally antagonizing, and seemingly exists just to start a fight with Philly it can’t finish.

I’ve thought about this way more than I should have and came up with several explanations/conspiracy theories for the use of this bag, absolutely none of which are based in reality: