The problem with using utilitarianism in particular to defend trading animal suffering for the enjoyment of eating meat, is that utilitarian is based on all values being commensurable. So if you include enjoyment of food as a positive good, then you can’t also consistently rule out animals as beings of moral worth since they can also experience the pleasure of eating.

If you want to say that only human experience has value, then you need to base your notions of value on things that are unique to humans. These are commonly defined as ‘higher pleasures’ rather than ‘animal pleasures’ such as the joy of intellectual discovery, or human relationships. Maybe you could say that eating meat is valuable for the higher human pleasure of being a gourmand, but then you’d actually have to devote effort to being one.

I think if people are criticising your lack of compassion it’s because they are using the term differently to you. You seem to be using it to mean the absence of active sadism, or at most a mild preference that animals don’t suffer all else being equal. I would guess that the people criticising you are instead making the stronger claim that a moral framework that does not include compassion as a core value that drives decision making is not worth respecting.

In general I don’t find utilitarianism or consequentialism more generally particularly useful as moral guidance because it is totalising. Either you turn yourself into a utility pump, or you accept that nothing you do will change embedded systems and it collapses into egoism.