I just like the taste of meat
The most honest answer anyone gives, and the hardest to defend. Enjoyment is not generally accepted as a justification for harm.
Taste is not a trivial preference: eating is one of the most basic and constant pleasures in a human life, and meat is central to many of the meals people enjoy most. People are entitled to weigh their own enjoyment in deciding how to live, and most food choices are made on exactly that basis without anyone demanding a moral defence. I would rather say plainly that I eat meat because I like it than pretend I have worked out some nutritional or philosophical justification that I haven't.
This has the considerable merit of being true. Most people eating meat are not doing so from nutritional necessity or careful ethical reasoning; they are doing it because they like it, and the rest is usually constructed afterwards.
As a justification it is correspondingly weak. Pleasure is not treated as sufficient grounds for harm in any other context (we do not accept it as a defence of other practices that cause suffering) and the stronger the concession that animals can suffer, the heavier the weight that 'I enjoy it' has to carry. It is the one objection where the honest response is not a counter-argument but the observation that the question has been answered truthfully and the answer is uncomfortable.
Applying a principle generally while claiming an exemption for one's own case, without giving a relevant reason for the exception.
How it applies here: Sensory pleasure is not accepted as sufficient justification for causing harm in other contexts. The exception claimed here comes with no supporting reason for why this case differs.