styling parent categories while displaying their children

Here’s the deal. I’ve got lots of categories, split up by 3 parent categories. I want to display each set of parent categories with its own color scheme on the page, ie if I call an Apple category, which has a parent of Fruit, I want it to show up blue (using css), just as if I called any other category archive with a parent of Fruit. Orange, Banana, Lime– they all show up blue.

But when I call a category with parent Bread, say Wheat for example, I want to css style it brown. Multi-grain shows up as brown, as does Rye and Pumpernickel.

The problem is that all I’ve got is the in_category() function, and I don’t really want to have to do an if… else for every single category (would hurt the expandability, if nothing else).

What I really want is an “in_parent_category($FruitID)” function. I found this (https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/37330), but I can’t figure out where to place it in my code, and I figure it needs to be inside the loop anyway, which doesn’t help me with dynamically styling the rest of the page.

Whew. Any ideas?